18th Century German Aesthetics

The philosophical discipline of aesthetics did not receive its name
until 1735, when the twenty-one year old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
introduced it in his Halle master's thesis to mean epistêmê
aisthetikê, or the science of what is sensed and imagined
(Baumgarten, Meditationes §CXVI, pp. 86–7). But
Baumgarten's denomination of the field was an adult baptism: without
the benefit of a name, aesthetics had been part of philosophy since
Plato attacked the educational value of many forms of art in
the Republic and Aristotle briefly defended them in his
fragmentary Poetics. In particular, Aristotle defended the
arts from Plato's charge that they are cognitively useless, trading in
mere images of particulars rather than universal truths, by arguing
that it is precisely the arts, or at least poetry, that deliver
universal truths in a readily graspable form, unlike, for example,
history, which deals merely with particular facts
(Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 9, 1451a37–1451b10). And
if experience of the arts can reveal important moral truths, then it
can also be important to the development of morality, the other pole
of Plato's doubts. Some variant of this response to Plato was the core
of aesthetics through much of subsequent philosophical history, and
indeed continued to be central to aesthetics through much of the
twentieth century. In the eighteenth century, however, two alternative
responses to Plato were introduced. One may be regarded as taking up
Aristotle's idea in the Poetics that "katharsis,"
purification or purgation, of the emotions of fear and pity, is a
valuable part of our response to a tragedy; this led to an emphasis on
the emotional impact of aesthetic experience that was downplayed in
the cognitivist tradition. This line of thought was emphasized by
Jean-Baptiste Du Bos in his Critical Reflections on Poetry,
Painting, and Music, published in France in 1719 and widely known
throughout Europe even before it was translated into other languages.
The other innovation was the idea that our response to beauty, whether
in nature or in art, is a free play of our mental powers that is
intrinsically pleasurable, and thus needs no epistemological or moral
justification, although it may in fact have epistemological and moral
benefits. This line of thought was introduced in Britain in Joseph
Addison's 1712 Spectator essays on “The Pleasures of
the Imagination,” and developed by subsequent Scottish writers
such as Francis Hutcheson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and Alexander
Gerard. It was only slowly received in Germany, hinted at by Moses
Mendelssohn in the late 1750s, who also took up Du Bos' emphasis on
the emotional impact of aesthetic experience, but then made its first
sustained appearance in the emphasis on the pleasure of the unhindered
activity of our powers of representation in some of the entries in
Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste
(1771–74), e.g., the entries on “beauty” and
“taste” (Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, vol. II,
pp. 371–85, at p. 371, and “Schön (Schöne Künste),”
vol. IV, pp. 305–19, at p. 307). It became central to the
aesthetic theories of Kant and Schiller in the Critique of the
Power of Judgment (1790) and the Letters on the Aesthetic
Education of Mankind (1795). This article will chronicle the
interaction between the traditional theory of aesthetic experience as
a special form of the cognition of truth and the newer theories of
aesthetic experience as a free play of cognitive (and sometimes other)
mental powers and as a vicarious experience of emotions in
eighteenth-century Germany.

The traditional idea that art is a special vehicle for the expression
of important truths is the basis for the work of the philosopher who
established the framework for German thought for much of the
18th century, namely, Christian Wolff
(1679–1754). Wolff never devoted a whole work to aesthetics, but
many of the ideas that would influence subsequent aesthetic theory are
contained in his Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul
of Man, his “German Metaphysics,” first published in
1719.

Originally appointed to teach mathematics at the Pietist-dominated
university of Halle, Wolff was inspired by both the mathematical and
philosophical genius of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716),
but published a vast systematic statement of a philosophy that was
constructed partly although by no means wholly on Leibnizian lines in
a way that Leibniz himself never did. Wolff's collected works (over
thirty volumes in German and forty in Latin) include German versions
of his logic, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, and teleology
as well as a four-volume encyclopedia of mathematical subjects. In
addition, there are expanded Latin versions of the logic, the
components of metaphysics including ontology, rational cosmology,
empirical psychology, rational psychology, and natural psychology, as
well as another four-volume mathematical compendium, seven volumes on
ethics, and no fewer than twelve volumes on political philosophy and
economics. In all of this vast output, the only thing that might look
like a work specifically in aesthetics is a treatise on architecture
included in his encyclopedia of mathematics. That very placement
indicates that Wolff regarded the discussion of architecture as part
of the theory of science; and in the Preliminary Discourse on
Philosophy in General that prefaces his Latin restatement of his
system, Wolff states more generally that a “philosophy of the
arts” is possible, but as part of “technics or
technology,” “the science of the arts and of the works of
art” (Wolff, Preliminary Discourse, §71,
p. 38). Here Wolff uses the term “art” (ars) in
the ancient sense of techne, which means any form of craft
requiring both aptitude and training, rather than in the specifically
modern sense of “fine art.” In his German works, Wolff
uses the word Kunst in the same broad way. Even with regard
to something closer to the fine arts, however, he says that
“There could also be a philosophy of the liberal arts, if they
were reduced to the form of a science….one might talk about
rhetorical philosophy, poetical philosophy, etc.” (ibid.,
§72, p. 39). Wolff certainly does not have the idea of the fine
arts as a domain of human production and response that differs in some
essential way from all other forms of human production and response,
thus he does not have the idea of aesthetics as a discipline that will
focus on what distinguishes the fine arts and our response to them
from everything else. Nevertheless, in the course of his works he
introduces some ideas about both the fine arts and our response to
them that will be seminal for the next half-century of German
thought.

The two key ideas that Wolff takes from Leibniz are, first, the
characterization of sensory perception as a clear but confused rather
than distinct perception of things that could, at least in principle,
be known both clearly and distinctly by the intellect; and, second,
the characterization of pleasure as the sensory, and thus clear but
confused, perception of the perfection of things. Leibniz's conception
of sensory perception was presented in a 1684 paper entitled
“Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas.” Here Leibniz
stated that “Knowledge is clear…when it makes it
possible for me to recognize the thing represented,” but that it
is “confused when I cannot enumerate one by one the
marks which are sufficient to distinguish the thing from others, even
though the thing may in truth have such marks and constituents into
which its concept can be resolved.” Conversely, knowledge is
both clear and distinct when one can not only clearly distinguish its
object from other objects but can also enumerate the
“marks” or properties of the object on which that
distinction is based. Leibniz then says that sensory perception is
clear but indistinct or confused knowledge, and illustrates his
general thesis about sense perception with a remark about the
perception and judgment of art: “Likewise we sometimes see
painters and other artists correctly judge what has been done well or
badly; yet they are often unable to give a reason for their judgment
but tell the inquirer that the work which displeases them lacks
‘something, I know not what’” (Leibniz,
“Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas,”
p. 291). This illustration would be decisive for Wolff and all of
those whom he in turn influenced.

The second idea that Wolff took over from Leibniz is the idea that
pleasure is itself the sensory perception of the perfection existing
in an object. For Leibniz and all his followers, there is one sense in
which all of the properties of actually existing objects can
be regarded as perfections, since they held that the actual world is
the one selected to exist by God from among all possible worlds
precisely because it is the most perfect; thus each object and all of
its properties must in some way contribute to the maximal perfection
of the actual world. But they also used the concept of perfection in a
more ordinary way, in which some actual objects have specific
perfections that others do not, and it is this sense of perfection
that Leibniz employed when he stated that

Pleasure is the feeling of a perfection or an excellence,
whether in ourselves or in something else. For the perfection of other
beings is also agreeable, such as understanding, courage, and
especially beauty in another human being, or in an animal or even in a
lifeless creation, a painting or a work of craftsmanship, as
well.

Leibniz also holds that the perfection that we perceive in other
objects is in some sense communicated to ourselves, although he does
not say that our pleasure in the perception of perfection is actually
directed at the self-perfection that is thereby caused. But there is
certainly a nascent view here that the perception of beauty in art,
although not only in art, is both intrinsically pleasurable and also
instrumentally valuable because it leads to self-improvement.

This is the background from which Wolff's own hints toward aesthetics
emerged. Wolff introduces the central concepts and principles of his
ontology in the second chapter of his German metaphysics, which deals
with “The first grounds of our cognition and all things in
general” (German Metaphysics, p. 66). After expounding
the formal principles that are the basis of all truth, the principles
of non-contradiction and sufficient reason, Wolff introduces the
concept that is the substantive basis of his ontology, namely the
concept of perfection. He defines perfection as the
“harmony” or “concordance”
(Zusammenstimmung) of a manifold or multiplicity of objects
or parts of objects—or as he says in Latin, perfectio est
consensus in varietate (Wolff, Ontologia, §503,
p. 390)—and illustrates this abstract definition with the
example of a work of technology:

E.g., one judges the perfection of a clock from its correctly
displaying the hours and their parts. It is however composed of many
parts, and these and their composition are aimed at the hands
displaying correctly the hours and their parts. Thus in a clock one
finds manifold things, that are all in concordance with one another.
(Wolff, German Metaphysics, §152, p. 152)

Here Wolff defines perfection in both formal and substantive terms:
formally, simply as the order or harmony of the parts in a whole; but
substantively, as the suitability of that order or harmony of parts
for achieving the aim that is intended for the whole, such as
accurately telling time in the case of a clock.

When we turn to Wolff's conceptions of the perfections of the
particular forms of art that he mentions, we will see that he always
has in mind both formal and substantive perfections for any particular
art. We should also note here that Wolff identifies order in
things with truth. He says that

Since everything has its sufficient ground why it
is, there must also always be a sufficient ground for why in simple
things the alterations succeed one another just so and not otherwise,
and why in composite things their parts are juxtaposed just thus and
not otherwise, and also their alterations succeed one another just so
and not otherwise.

He contrasts this order with the disorder that reigns in dreams,
and then says that

Accordingly truth is nothing other than
order in the alternations of things while the dream is
disorder in the alteration of things. (German Metaphysics,
§142, pp. 146–8)

In a 1729 lecture on “The enjoyment that
one can derive from the cognition of truth,” Wolff does not in
the first instance treat truth as a semantic correspondence between a
linguistic representation and the object represented, or an epistemic
relation between a mental representation and an external reality, but
as an objective property consisting in coherence within things
themselves, which is precisely what perfection consists in as
well. But there is nevertheless a strongly cognitivist cast to
Wolff's aesthetics.

Wolff next defines clarity and distinctness and indistinctness in
cognition. Thoughts are clear “when we know well what we think,
and can distinguish that from other things”; they are obscure if
we cannot even distinguish the objects of our thoughts from other
objects (German Metaphysics, §§198–9, p.
188). Clear thoughts are also distinct if we not only know what
objects we are thinking of but if “our thoughts are also clear
with respect to their parts or the manifold that is to be found in
them” (German Metaphysics, §207, p. 194), and are
otherwise indistinct or confused. Wolff then defines sensations
(Empfindungen) as those thoughts “which have their
ground in the alterations of the members of our body and which are
occasioned by corporeal things outside us,” and the
“capacity for having sensations as the senses”
(German Metaphysics, §220, p. 202). He then adopts
Leibniz's view that sensations or sensory perceptions are typically
clear but indistinct or confused (German Metaphyics,
§214, p. 198). Unlike Leibniz, the systematic Wolff observes that
sensations come in differing degrees of clarity (German
Metaphysics, §224, p. 206), but they are nevertheless all
indistinct to some degree. This means that at least in principle a
purely intellectual or conceptual representation is always a better
source of knowledge of its object than is a sensory representation of
it.

This in turn means that an aesthetic perception of a perfection is
always a less than optimal cognition of that perfection, for having
described sense perception or sensory cognition as clear but
indistinct or confused, Wolff next defines pleasure as the sensory or
“intuitive” cognition of perfection. In his German
metaphysics, he writes that “Insofar as we intuit perfection,
pleasure arises in us, thus pleasure is nothing other than an
intuition of perfection, as Descartes already remarked”
(German Metaphysics, §404, p. 344). Wolff's successors
will struggle to avoid the limitations on the cognitive significance
of aesthetic response that follow from his definition of pleasure as a
kind of sense perception and the limits he places on the cognitive
significance of sense perception.

While Wolff's basic account of pleasure is problematic, he does
provide a straightforward account of beauty. Wolff defines beauty as
the perfection of an object insofar it can be perceived by us with and
through the feeling of pleasure: “Beauty consists in the
perfection of a thing, insofar as it is suitable for producing
pleasure in us” (Psychologia Empirica, §544,
p. 420). This definition enunciates a clear position on the
ontological status of beauty, which will often be vexed in the
eighteenth century. Beauty is an objective property, founded in the
perfection of things, but it is also a relational rather than
intrinsic property, for it is attributed to perfection only insofar as
there are subjects like us who can perceive it sensorily. Given
perceivers like us, beauty is coextensive with or emergent from
perfection, but in a universe without such perceivers perfection would
not be equivalent to beauty.

Thus far we have considered only Wolff's most abstract definition of
perfection and therefore of beauty, namely that it is the coherence of
a manifold insofar as we can perceive that through the sensation of
pleasure. When he mentions or discusses specific arts, Wolff invokes
more specific conceptions of perfection and thus of the beauties of
those arts. In the case of the visual arts of painting and sculpture,
Wolff locates their perfection in imitation or veridical
representation, while other arts find their perfections in the
fulfillment of intended uses. He uses the examples of painting and
architecture in the German metaphysics to illustrate his claim that
pleasure arises from the intuition of perfection. Thus,

the perfection of a painting consists in its
similarity. For since a painting is nothing other than a
representation of a given object on a tablet or flat surface,
everything in it is harmonious if nothing can be discerned in it that
one does not also perceive in the thing itself,

and

if a connoisseur of architecture contemplates a
building that has been constructed in accordance with the rules of
architecture, he thereby cognizes its perfection. (German
Metaphysics, §404, p. 344)

Wolff frequently reiterates that the perfection of painting or
sculpture consists in accurate representation without further
amplification (“On the enjoyment that can be derived from the
cognition of truth,” §7, p. 257, and Psychologia
Empirica, §512, pp. 389–90, and §544,
pp. 420–1); he is simply using what he takes to be a
non-controversial fact about painting to confirm his connection of
pleasure with the intuition of perfection. In his extended discussion
of architecture, however, he reveals a more subtle conception of the
perfections and thus the “rules” of architecture. Wolff's
discussion of architecture makes it clear that in order for us to
perceive it as beautiful, a building must display both the formal
perfection of coherence as well as the substantive perfection of being
suitable, indeed comfortable for its intended use.

Wolff begins his treatise on the Foundations of Architecture
with the claim that “architecture is a science for constructing
a building so that it is in complete correspondence with the
intentions of the architect” (Wolff, Principles of
Architecture, §1, p. 305). This locates the harmony or
agreement in which perfection always consists in the relation between
the intentions of the architect and the building that results from his
plans and supervision. However, as he proceeds Wolff makes it clear
that the intention of an architect is always to produce a structure
that is both formally beautiful as well as useful and comfortable, so
the perfection that subsists in the relation between intention and
outcome in fact consists in the perfection of both form and utility in
the building itself. Thus, Wolff argues on the one hand that “A
building is space that is enclosed by art in order that certain
functions can proceed there securely and unhindered”
(Architecture, §4, p. 306), and that “A building
is comfortable if all necessary functions can proceed within it
without hindrance and vexation” (Architecture, §7,
p. 307). These definitions form the basis for a requirement of
perfection in the utility of a building. On the other hand, however,
Wolff also introduces his standard definition of beauty, namely
“Beauty is perfection or the necessary appearance thereof,
insofar as the former or the latter is perceived, and causes a
pleasure in us” (Architecture, §8, p. 307), and
then asserts that “A building must be constructed beautifully
and decoratively” (Architecture, §18, p. 309).
This is the basis for the requirement of formal rather than
utilitarian perfection in a building. Throughout the remainder of the
treatise, both conceptions of perfection are at work. Wolff does not
explicitly extend this complex analysis of perfection to other arts,
although it is not difficult to imagine how that extension might go:
in painting we might respond to formal features of composition as well
as to the accuracy of depiction, in sculpture we might respond to the
intrinsic beauty of the marble or bronze as well as to the accuracy of
depiction, and so on.

Finally, we must ask about the moral and religious implications of
Wolff's contributions to aesthetics. As we have seen, Wolff equates
perfection, which is the object of pleasure in all contexts including
those subsequently labeled aesthetic, with an objective sense of
truth. However, and in this regard most unlike the German
aestheticians of the next several generations who are so strongly
influenced by him in other regards, he has nothing to say about the
arts that are typically paradigmatic for those who ground their
aesthetics on the notion of truth rather than that of play, namely
literature, especially poetry and drama. Thus he does not consider the
paradox of tragedy, formulated by Du Bos and then discussed by
virtually every other eighteenth-century writer on literature, nor
does he emphasize the moral benefits of uplifting literature, as so
many others do. Indeed, he has nothing explicit to say about the moral
benefits of aesthetic experience, nor does he directly consider the
religious significance of such experience in any of his discussions of
it. Nevertheless, it is clear that aesthetic experience does have
religious significance for Wolff, because his philosophy culminates in
a religious teleology. For Wolff, the most perfect and therefore most
orderly of all possible worlds exists for a reason, namely to mirror
the perfection of God, and sentient and cognizant beings such as
ourselves exist for a reason, namely to recognize and admire the
perfection of God that is mirrored in the perfection of things in the
world and of the world as a whole. The perfection that is added to the
natural world through human artistry is also part of the perfection of
the world that emanates from and mirrors the perfection of God. Thus,
in admiring the perfection of art we are performing part of our larger
function in the world, namely admiring the perfection of God. Wolff
states the premise of his teleology quite clearly in a work devoted
entirely to that subject, the Rational Thoughts on the Aims of
Natural Things, or “German teleology.” There he
declares that

The chief aim of the world is this, that we should
cognize the perfection of God from it. Now if God would attain this
aim, he also had to arrange the world in such a way that a rational
being could extract from the contemplation of it grounds that would
allow him to infer with certainty the properties of God and what can
be known about him. (Rational Thoughts on the Aims of Natural
Things, §8, p. 6)

Several sections later, he uses the metaphor of
the mirror to describe the relation between God, the world, and we who
look at the mirror:

Now if the world is to be a mirror of the wisdom
of God, then we must encounter divine aims in it and perceive the
means by which he attains these aims…. And accordingly the
connection of things in the world with one another makes it into a
mirror of [God's] wisdom…. (ibid., §14, pp. 18–19;
see also German Metaphysics, §1045, p.
802)

Wolff writes as a spokesman for the Enlightenment, and he is emphatic
that God reveals his wisdom and power not by intervening in the course
of the world by means of miracles, but rather by designing everything
in the world as if it were all smoothly-running machines that can
achieve his goals without further intervention (see German
Metaphysics, §1037, p. 796). This might seem to leave no
room at all for the human creation of art, which all
eighteenth-century writers will conceive of as a production of genius
that is the complete opposite of anything mechanical. But for Wolff
our ability to produce works of art is another manifestation of the
perfection of the world—of which we are a part—and in turn
of God. Wolff draws no distinction between the works of human art that
are the subject of the “science of art” and the works of
nature, nor for that matter any distinction between the works of human
art that are the subject of the “science of art” and those
human creations that are the subjects of the “doctrine of morals
and statecraft”: they are all forms of perfection which, in a
teleological natural theology, all ultimately mirror the perfection of
God. And no doubt Wolff hardly thought it necessary to spell out the
moral benefits of such a recognition.

In Wolff's description of the experience of beauty as the
“sensitive cognition of perfection,” cognition is
naturally understood as knowledge of truth, so in the first instance
Wolff's formula meant that the experience of beauty is knowledge of
truth by means of the senses. Yet Wolff's conception of perfection was
broad enough to include successful adaptation to an intended purpose,
and thus in his analysis of our experience of architecture he
emphasized our sense of the utility of structures as well as a sensory
response to the kind of abstract form that could be considered an
object of cognition. But it was the idea that aesthetic experience is
a sensory apprehension of truth that dominated in Wolff's most general
statements. After 1720, Wolff's philosophy enjoyed an influence in
most parts of Germany similar to that which the philosophy of Locke
exercised in most quarters in Britain by then and in France beginning
a decade or two later. So the history of German aesthetics after Wolff
is a history of the attempt to find room for a fuller account of
aesthetic experience within a framework that privileges the idea of
cognition, and only gradually was room found for the idea that the
free play of our mental powers, including not only imagination but at
least for some authors also emotion, could be equally important. The
first round of this struggle was a debate extending from the late
1720s until the 1740s between the Leipzig literary figure Johann
Christoph Gottsched and the Zürich critics Johann Jacob Bodmer and
Johann Jacob Breitinger, in which the issue was really just how much
room there could be for the freedom of imagination within a theory of
poetry based on the idea that poetry is a truthful imitation of
nature. This might be understood as an early form of debate over how
much room there is for the free play of imagination in aesthetic
experience.

From a distance of almost three hundred years, the differences between
the “critical poetics” (critische Dichtkunst) of
Johann Christoph Gottsched and his critics may seem small, because to
us they are all so clearly working within the paradigm established by
Wolff. Yet in the 1730s and 1740s their debate was intense, not just
because Gottsched was a self-important controversialist who clearly
enjoyed being on center stage, but also because their debate about the
proper scope and power of the imagination was both theoretically
interesting and reflected a tectonic shift in German taste. This shift
is away from the French classicism represented by Racine and Corneille
to the freer forms of Milton and Shakespeare, which in turn lead to
the pan-European romanticism of the later eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.

Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66) was born in Königsberg
and studied philosophy there. He began teaching philosophy there in
1723, but fled the Prussian draft the next year and settled in the
Saxon city of Leipzig, where Leibniz had earlier studied. Leipzig is
only thirty kilometers away from Halle, the Prussian city where Wolff
had been teaching for two decades; but Wolff had been driven from
Halle in 1722 by the reaction to his argument that the
“atheistic” Chinese could arrive at the same moral truths
as Christian Europeans by the use of human reason alone. So Gottsched
may never have met Wolff. Nevertheless, he had already been exposed to
Wolffian philosophy in Königsberg, and his two-volume Erste
Gründe der gesamten Weltweisheit (“First Principles of
all Philosophy,” 1733–34), which includes an extensive
review of natural science as well as logic, metaphysics, and ethics,
became the most widely adopted textbook of Wolffian
philosophy. However, although he eventually held the professorship in
logic and metaphysics in Leipzig, Gottsched was also the professor of
poetry, and by far the greatest part of his boundless energy was
devoted to literature and philology. In the history of aesthetics, his
reputation rests on his Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst vor
die Deutschen (“Essay toward a Critical Poetics for the
Germans,” 1730, with further editions in 1737, 1742, and
1751).

The practical aim of the Critical Poetics was to elevate the
tone of German popular theater and moderate the Baroque excesses of
the upper-class theater by recommending the model of the classical
French theater of Racine and Corneille. The theoretical basis of the
work was the Wolffian principle that the theater and other forms of
poetry (Gottsched had little to say about the emerging medium of the
novel) should be used to convey important moral truths through images
that would make them accessible and engaging for a wide audience.
Gottsched stated his position a year before the Critical
Poetics in a speech with the anti-Platonic title “Plays and
especially tragedies are not to be banished from a well-ordered
republic” where he defined a tragedy as

an instructive moral poem, in which an important
action of preeminent persons is imitated and presented on the
stage. (Gottsched, Schriften, p. 5)

He revealed the underlying premise of his
argument when he observed that

The improvement of the human heart is not a work
which can happen in an hour. It requires a thousand preparations, a
thousand circumstances, much knowledge, conviction, experiences,
examples and encouragement…. (Schriften, p. 9)

It would become a central theme of German
Enlightenment aesthetics that even if people know the general truths
of morality in some abstract way, the arts can make those truths
concrete, alive, and effective for them in a way that nothing else
can. The Critical Poetics opens with a brief history of
poetry rather than with a statement of theoretical principles, but its
first chapter concludes with a similar suggestion that the point of
poetry is to make moral truths alive through their presentation in a
form accessible to our senses: “The arousal of affects
is…much livelier” in tragedy and comedy than anywhere
else,

because the visible representation of persons is
far more sensibly touching than the best description. The manner of
writing is, especially in tragedy, noble and sublime, and it has
rather a superfluity than a lack of instructive sayings. Even comedy
teaches and instructs the observer, although it arouses
laughter. (Schriften, p. 33)

The details of Gottsched's view emerge in the
succeeding chapters on “The character of a poet” and
“On the good taste of a poet.”

In the first of these chapters, Gottsched defines a poet as one who
produces imitations of nature:

A poet is a skilled imitator of all natural things; and this he has in
common with painters, connoisseurs of music, etc. He is however
distinguished from these by the manner of his imitation and the means
through which he achieves it. The painter imitates nature with brush
and colors; the musician through beat and harmony; the poet, however,
through a discourse that is rhythmic or otherwise well arranged; or,
which is much the same, through a harmonious and good-sounding text,
which we call a poem. (Schriften, p. 39)

Gottsched goes on to argue that a poet must have a sharp wit or
acumen, a “power of mind which readily perceives the similarity
of things and thus can make a comparison among them,” but also
that such a “natural gift” is “in itself still raw
and imperfect if it is not awaked and cleansed of the incorrectness
that clings to it” (Schriften, p. 44).

For the wit of a poet to lead to good results, it must therefore be
accompanied with “art and learning,” “extensive
scholarship,” and a strong “power of judgment,”
including sound moral judgment, because his task is to make moral
truths accessible to his audience through his imitations. All of
these capacities require cultivation; once they have been cultivated,
the artist can better fulfill his double task of imitation: through
the imitation of worthy deeds in the medium of his art, he is to
encourage his audience to the performance of similarly worthy deeds
themselves.

Thus far, Gottsched has not made special use of Wolffian terms. His
ensuing discussion of the “good taste of a poet” is more
explicitly Wolffian. Gottsched begins by characterizing taste in its
literal sense—the taste of food or drink—as a form of
representation “that for all of its clarity has nothing distinct
in it.” He then states that in its “metaphorical”
sense taste is always associated with the “liberal arts and
other sensible things,” such as “poetry, oratory, music,
painting, and architecture, likewise in dress, gardens, household
furnishings, etc.,” not with subjects “where it is a
matter of reason alone” and “where it is possible to make
the strictest demonstrations from distinctly cognized fundamental
truths,” such as “arithmetic and geometry or other
sciences” (Schriften, pp. 60–1). Thus
“metaphorical as well as ordinary taste has to do only with
clear but not entirely distinct concepts of things, and distinguishes
from one another the sort of things that one judges in accordance with
mere sensation.” However, although it follows from the fact that
judgments of taste are made on the basis of “clear but not
entirely distinct concepts” that “people who judge merely
on the basis of taste” can arrive at opposite conclusions,
Gottsched holds that such opposed judgments cannot both be true, and
that there must be a true fact of the matter to which one but not the
other of them corresponds. In other words, although judgments of taste
are made on the basis of clear but indistinct concepts, which is to
say sensory perceptions and feelings rather than clear and distinct
concepts, they nevertheless

have their ground in the unalterable nature of
things themselves; in the concordance of the manifold; in order and
harmony. These laws, which are investigated, discovered, and confirmed
through lengthy experience and much reflection, are unbreakable and
firm, even if someone who judges in accordance with his taste
sometimes gives preference to those works which more or less violate
them. (Schriften, pp. 62–3)

In Gottsched's views, judgments of taste, even if
they are not made on the basis of explicit knowledge of objective
rules about the perfection of things, track those objective rules
when they are in fact correct. Experts in the relevant art can make
those rules explicit. The “touchstone” for judgments of
taste

is thus found in the rules for perfection that are
suitable for every particular kind of beautiful things, whether
buildings, paintings, music, etc., and which can be distinctly
conceived and demonstrated by genuine masters
thereof. (Schriften, pp. 64–5)

Thus judgments of taste are not to be attributed
to “wit, nor to imagination, nor to memory,” nor to any
“sixth sense,” but to “understanding,”
although not to “reason” (Schriften,
pp. 63–4)), since these judgments track the rules that the
experts know but are not explicitly derived from those rules.

And what are the rules in accordance with which judgments of taste are
tacitly made? The most general rule is simply that art should imitate
nature, so that in order to be beautiful art must imitate what is
beautiful in nature. Poets in particular must give truthful but lively
descriptions of “natural things,” and in the case of
poetry destined for the theater they must give their characters
“such words, gestures, and actions” as are
“appropriate to their circumstances” (Schriften,
p. 81). Gottsched does not interpret this rule to mean that poets can
describe only the actual actions and feelings of actual people; of
course poetry can present fables as well as history. But for Gottsched
a fable is

an occurrence that is possible in certain
circumstances although it has not actually taken place, in which a
useful moral truth lies hidden. Philosophically one could say that it
is a piece of another possible world (Schriften, p. 86)

Insofar as it does not recount an actual event a
fable is “probable” rather than “true.” But
for Gottsched probability depends upon the consistency of the
fictional event with the actual laws of nature, in particular the
laws of human nature, even though the circumstances of the fictional
world differ in some regard from those of the actual world. In this
regard even the fable must still be an imitation of nature with all
its perfections. Of course Gottsched's rider that the fable must
contain a hidden moral truth means that it must also be consistent
with the real rules of moral perfection, and indeed that the point of
poetic indulgence in fable or fiction is precisely to make a moral
truth alive and forceful to us by showing that it holds even in a
possible world that differs from the actual world in certain of its
facts but not in its principles.

Gottsched's work became the subject of a “war of the
poets” with the Swiss writers Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann
Jacob Breitinger. Bodmer (1698–1783) taught Swiss history in
Zürich for forty years, advocated the works of Dante and
Shakespeare, and translated Milton's Paradise Lost into
German prose. Breitinger (1701–76) taught Greek, Hebrew, logic,
and rhetoric, and edited the works of the German Baroque poet Martin
Opitz. Together, they edited Die Discourse der Mahlern
(“The Discourse of the Painters”), Switzerland's first
“moral weekly” based on the model of The
Spectator, from 1721–23. These essays did not concern
painting at all or even general issues about the arts very
much—the name merely reflects their use of the names of famous
painters as pseudonymous signatures for their articles—although
one of Bodmer's articles on Opitz celebrated the imagination as the
key to poetic success: “A writer such as our Opitz who has
enriched and filled the imagination with images of things can write
poetry that is lively and natural” and by “the strength of
his imagination bring back all the ideas that he had when he was
really in love, empathetic, depressed, or enraged” (Die
Discourse der Mahlern, Erster Theil, XIX Discourse, cited
from Dichtungstheorien der Aufklärung, p. 13).

The emphasis on the imagination seems to have been the central issue
in Bodmer and Breitinger's dispute with Gottsched, which came to a
head in Breitinger's own Critische Dichtkunst, published in
1740 with a forward by Bodmer. Because they shared with Gottsched the
general assumption that art is based on the imitation of nature and
has the goal of making important moral truths come alive for us, it is
hard to see exactly what divided the two sides in this dispute, but
the key seems to lie in their conception of poetic fables. As we saw,
Gottsched believed that a poetic fable describes events in a possible
rather than in the actual world, but he insists that the laws of
nature and human nature must remain constant: thus a poetic fable can
depict a hero who never existed, and make some moral truth alive to us
through its depiction of this possible rather than actual hero, but
everything about this hero and his world should still be
natural. Bodmer and Breitinger, however, as advocates of Shakespeare
and Milton, believed that important moral truths could be made alive
to us through works of the poetic imagination that depart more
drastically from actual nature and history. They held that novelty is
an especially powerful source of aesthetic pleasure and thus an
especially powerful means of making moral truths come alive, and for
this reason they concluded that “since the most ancient
times” the fable has been the means “for bringing the most
useful but at the same time best known moral truths home to us in a
pleasing way” (Breitinger, Critische Dichtkunst, cited
from Dichtungstheorien der Aufklärung, p. 42). Their idea is
that the more imaginative inventions of the poets—the Satan of
Milton or the Caliban of Shakespeare rather than the more human heroes
of Racine and Corneille admired by Gottsched—make moral truths
appear more alive precisely by their attention-grabbing departure from
the familiar creatures of the real world. Thus Bodmer and Breitinger
thought that the moralistic aim of poetry that they accepted in common
with Gottsched could be better achieved by a freer use of the
imagination in poetry than Gottsched was prepared to allow. They
agreed in their philosophical analysis of the ends of art but
disagreed in their empirical assessment of its most effective
means.

By their advocacy of Milton and Shakespeare, the most imaginative
poets of the preceding century, Bodmer and Breitinger prepared the way
for subsequent artistic movements that emphasized the freedom of the
imagination, even while they continued to work within the conceptual
framework of Wolffian perfectionism. The same is true for two
professional philosophers of the time who also worked within the
Wolffian framework but took at least one step towards an aesthetic
theory that could subsequently give the play of the mental powers
equal importance with the sensible representation of truth by treating
the aesthetic qualities of representations as parallel to rather than
identical with their purely cognitive qualities. So let us now turn to
the innovations of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and his disciple and
ally, Georg Friedrich Meier. Meier actually responded directly to
Gottsched in a number of polemics, but since his views were based
largely—although not entirely—on Baumgarten's, it will be
better to treat them together than to treat Meier now.

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), as previously
mentioned, introduced the term “aesthetics” in his 1735
thesis Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema
pertinentibus (“Philosophical meditations pertaining to
some matters concerning poetry”). Baumgarten's new name for the
discipline did not, however, signify a complete break with earlier
philosophical views, that is, with the perfectionist aesthetics of
Leibniz and Wolff. By introducing the concept of “analogue of
reason” Baumgarten did however make one key departure from the
Wolffian model that would eventually open the way for much more
radical reconceptions of aesthetic experience in Germany; Baumgarten
would also introduce an emphasis on the emotional impact of art that
is lacking in Wolff. But Baumgarten nevertheless remained more a Moses
who glimpsed the new theory from the shores of Wolffianism than a
Joshua who conquered the new aesthetic territory.

Baumgarten was the son of a Pietist minister from Berlin, but was
orphaned by the time he was eight. He followed his older brother Jacob
Sigismund (who would become a prominent theologian and historian of
religion) to Halle when he was thirteen. The Baumgartens thus arrived
in Halle just after Wolff had been expelled and the study of his
philosophy banned, although the ban was less strictly enforced at the
famous Pietist orphanage and school in Halle (the Franckesche Stift)
where they went first than at the university. The younger Baumgarten
started at the university at sixteen (in 1730), and studied theology,
philology, poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy, especially Leibniz, whose
philosophy unlike that of Wolff had not been banned. He began teaching
there himself in 1735, upon the acceptance of his thesis on poetry,
and published his Metaphysics in 1739. In 1740, the same year
as he published his Ethics, he was called to a
professorship—or more precisely, ordered to accept it—at
another Prussian university, in Frankfurt an der Oder. Georg Friedrich
Meier (1718–1777), who had been studying with Baumgarten, took
over his classes and was himself appointed professor at Halle in
1746.

Having published the textbooks for his metaphysics and ethics classes
(which Kant would still use decades later), Baumgarten then returned
to aesthetics, and began working on a major treatise in 1742. The
first volume of his Aesthetica appeared in 1750. It was
written in Latin, like Baumgarten's other works, and was the first
work ever to use the name of the new discipline as a title. The next
year, however, Baumgarten's health began to decline, and a second
volume of the Aesthetica came out only in 1758, under
pressure from the publisher. The two volumes cover just under a third
of Baumgarten's original plan, although they may have included the
most original part of the plan. Meanwhile, Meier had been publishing
profusely in Halle since the early 1740s, with works in or relevant to
aesthetics including a Theoretical Doctrine of the Emotions
in 1744, a twenty-five part Evaluation of Gottsched's Poetics
collected in book form in 1747, a three-volume Foundations of the
Beautiful Sciences from 1748–1750, and a condensation of
the latter, the Extract from the Foundations of the Beautiful Arts
and Sciences in 1757. (Meier also published massive textbooks in
logic, metaphysics, and ethics, as well as a memoir of Baumgarten and
a German translation of Baumgarten's
Latin Metaphysics). Although Meier thus published his main
treatise in aesthetics before Baumgarten did, he claimed it was based
on Baumgarten's lectures, and always presented himself as a disciple
of Baumgarten.

Baumgarten's Meditations on Poetry conclude with his famous
introduction of the term “aesthetics”: “The Greek
philosophers and the Church fathers have always carefully
distinguished between the aistheta and the noeta,” that is,
between objects of sense and objects of thought, and while the latter,
that is, “what can be cognized through the higher faculty”
of mind, are “the object of logic, the aistheta are the subject
of the episteme aisthetike or AESTHETICS,” the science of
perception (Meditationes, §CXVI, p. 86). But this work
says nothing about in what way the new discipline might be a general
science of perception, and analyzes only the nature of poetry and our
experience of it. We will first see what is novel in Baumgarten's
theory of poetry, and then turn to his larger work to see what it
suggests about the general character of the new discipline. Baumgarten
begins the work with a series of definitions, defining
“discourse” as a “series of words that bring to mind
[intelligimus] connected representations,”
“sensible representations” as ones “received through
the lower part of the cognitive faculty,” “sensible
discourse” as a “discourse of sensible
representations,” and finally a “poem” as a
“perfect sensible discourse.” The parts of sensible
discourse are “(1) sensible representations, (2) their
interconnections, and (3) the words, or the articulate sounds which
are represented by the letters and which symbolize the words,”
and sensible discourse is “directed toward the apprehension of
sensible discourse” (Meditationes,
§§I–IX, pp. 6–10). The key thoughts in this
series of definitions is that poetry is aimed not just at conveying
truth, but at conveying it by means of “sensible
representations,” or imagery drawn from the senses, and that the
“perfection” of a poem may lie in both its medium, that
is, the words its uses, and the imagery it arouses, and indeed in the
relationship between these two dimensions. Thus Baumgarten introduces
the idea that the sensible imagery a work of art arouses is not just a
medium, more or less perfect, for conveying truth, but a locus of
perfection in its own right. This is a view that was barely hinted at
by Wolff, and not at all in his discussion of imitation as the
perfection of mimetic arts, but only in his discussion of mixed arts
like architecture, where he took into account the appearance as well
as the function of structural elements.

As he continues Baumgarten remains within the Wolffian framework by
defining sensible representations as clear rather than
obscure—thus he rejects poetry that aims at obscurity for its
own sake (Meditationes, §XIII, p. 14)—but confused
rather than distinct, and thus as conveying more representations
packed together rather than fewer that are neatly separated. Or as he
puts it, poems aim for extensive rather
than intensive clarity, conveying more rather than less
information but without separating the images from each other, as
would be aimed for in scientific or “logical” discourse
(Meditationes, §§XVI–XVII, p. 16). And since
individuals are more fully determined, or more fully characterized,
than any abstraction, “particular representations are in the
highest degree poetic” (Meditationes, §XIX,
p. 18): poetry achieves its goal of arousing a density of images by
portraying individuals in particular circumstances rather than by
trafficking in generalities and abstractions. Thus Baumgarten turns
what is a vice in scientific knowledge—connoting too many ideas
without clearly distinguishing among them—into the paradigm
virtue of poetry.

What is particularly striking is that he then uses what we might call
this quantitative conception of the aim of poetry, that it arouse more
and denser rather than fewer and more clearly separated images, as the
basis for an argument that poetry should be emotionally
affecting. First he argues that poetry aims to arouse our affects or
engage our emotions simply because they are sensible:

Since affects are more notable degrees of pain and
pleasure, their sensible representations are given in representing
something to oneself confusedly as good or bad, and thus they
determine poetic representations, and to arouse affects is
poetic. (Meditationes, §XXV, p. 24)

But then he goes on to give an explicitly
quantitative argument for this conclusion:

The same can be demonstrated by this reasoning also: we represent more
in those things which we represent as good and bad for us than if we
do not so represent them; therefore representations of things which
are confusedly exhibited as good or bad for us are extensively clearer
than if they were not so displayed, hence they are more poetic. Now
such representations are motions of the affects, hence to arouse
affects is poetic. (Meditationes, §XXVI, pp.
24–6)

Baumgarten thus innovates within the formal structure of Wolffian
philosophy in order to accommodate a non-cognitivist aspect of the
aims of art. This aspect of Baumgarten's early poetics clearly
impressed his student Meier, who devoted one of his earliest books to
a Theoretical Doctrine of the Emotions, or
“Gemüthsbewegungen,” literally, “movements
of the mind.” Meier states that

Aesthetics is in general the science of sensible
cognition. This science concerns itself with everything that can be
assigned in more detail to sensible cognition and to its
presentation. Now since the passions have a strong influence on
sensible cognition and its presentation, aesthetics for its part can
rightly demand a theory of the emotions. (Meier, Theoretische
Lehre der Gemüthsbewegungen, §7, p. 7)

However, since Baumgarten himself does not give
as much emphasis to the emotional aspect of the experience of art in
his Aesthetica as his earlier Meditations might lead
us to expect, perhaps because it remained incomplete, we will return
to Meier's development of this theme only after we have considered
Baumgarten's mature work.

Before we can turn to the Aesthetica, however, we must look
at some of the key definitions Baumgarten lays down in the chapter on
“Empirical Psychology” in his Metaphysics.
Baumgarten begins by defining the “inferior” or
“lower faculty of cognition” as that which works with
sensible representations, which are in turn “indistinct, that
is, obscure or confused” (Metaphysik,
§§382–3, pp. 115–16). Sensible representations
can be developed in either of two ways, however: either with
increasing clarity of their component “marks,” in which
case they acquire “greater clarity (claritas intensive
maior),” or with increasing “multitude of
marks,” in which case they acquire ”liveliness
(vividitas, claritas extensive maior, cogitationum
nitor)” (Nitor means brightness or
splendor).” The former development of cognition leads to proofs,
while what makes a perception lively is a “painterly” form
of clarity (eine malende), thus one that consists in richness
of imagery rather than analytical clarity (Metaphysik,
§393, p. 119). It is this liveliness rather than probative
clarity which is the basis of aesthetic experience.

Baumgarten then defines judgment as the representation of the
perfection or imperfection of things. Judgment is initially divided
into “practical” judgment, the object of which is
“things foreseen,” and “theoretical judgment,”
which concerns everything else (Metaphysik, §451, p.
139). Theoretical judgment is in turn divided into that which is
distinct and that which is rather sensible, and the “ability to
judge sensibly is taste in the broad,” that is,
aesthetic sense. So taste is the ability to judge perfections and
imperfections sensibly rather than intellectually. Perfections and
imperfections, it should be noted, are defined entirely formally as
the “agreement or disagreement” of the “manifold of
a thing” (Metaphysik, §452, p. 139). Next,
Baumgarten divides the sensible representation or judgment of
perfections and imperfections into the “intuitive” and the
“symbolic,” that is, those which consist in sensible
properties directly and those which consist in sensible properties
taken as symbols of something else, and then adds that the sensible
cognition of a perfection is pleasing and that of its imperfection
displeasing. If I have sensible cognition neither of an object's
perfection nor its imperfection, then it is indifferent to me
(Metaphysik, §478, p. 150). Finally, Baumgarten states
that beauty is perfection perceived by means of the senses rather than
by the pure intellect (Metaphysik, §488,
pp. 154–5).

Thus far, then, Baumgarten has remained within the conceptual
framework of Wolff. One key addition to Wolff that he makes in
the Metaphysics, however, is the concept of the analogon
rationis, the “analogue of reason.” He writes:

I cognize the interconnection of some things distinctly, and of others
indistinctly, consequently I have the faculty for both. Consequently
I have an understanding, for insight into the connections of things,
that is, reason (ratio); and a faculty for
indistinct insight into the connections of things, which consists of
the following: 1) the sensible faculty for insight into the
concordances among things, thus sensible wit; 2) the sensible faculty
for cognizing the differences among things, thus sensible acumen; 3)
sensible memory; 4) the faculty of invention; 5) the faculty of
sensible judgment and taste together with the judgment of the senses;
6) the expectation of similar cases; and 7) the faculty of sensible
designation. All of these lower faculties of cognition, in so far as
they represent the connections among things, and in this respect are
similar to reason, comprise that which is similar to reason
(analogon rationis), or the sum of all the cognitive
faculties that represent the connections among things
indistinctly. (Metaphysik, §468,
p. 146)

Baumgarten's departure from Wolff here may be subtle, but his idea is
that the use of a broad range of our mental capacities for dealing
with sensory representations and imagery is not an inferior and
provisional substitute for reason and its logical and
scientific analysis, but something parallel to reason.
Moreover, this complex of human mental powers is productive of
pleasure, through the sensible representation of perfection, in its
own right. Baumgarten has not yet introduced the idea that aesthetic
pleasure comes from the free play of our mental powers, but he has
relaxed the grip of the assumption that aesthetic response is a
straightforward case of cognition.

The potential of this idea finally begins to emerge in
the Aesthetica. Taking up where the Meditations had
left off, Baumgarten begins the “Prolegomena” of this work
with his famous definition of aesthetics:

Aesthetics (the theory of the liberal arts, the
logic of the lower capacities of cognition [gnoseologia
inferior], the art of thinking beautifully, the art of
the analogon rationis) is the science of sensible
cognition. (Aesthetica, §1)

Baumgarten's list of synonyms may be confusing,
for it includes both traditional and novel designations of his
subject matter. He explains in the preface to the second edition of
the Metaphysics that he

Yet it is clear that he means his own new science
to be broader in scope than some of the more traditional definitions
he brackets: he intends to provide a general science of
sensible cognition rather than just a theory of the fine arts
or our taste for them. Although Baumgarten makes some broad claims
for the new science, this is not where the novelty of
the Aesthetica lies, for at least in the extant part of the
work Baumgarten never actually develops this theme. Instead, the
innovation comes at the beginning of the first chapter of the work,
when Baumgarten writes that

The aim of aesthetics is the perfection of
sensible cognition as such, that is, beauty, while its imperfection as
such, that is, ugliness, is to be avoided. (Aesthetica,
§14)

Baumgarten's departure from Wolff's formula that beauty is the
sensitive cognition of perfection may easily be overlooked, but in his
transformation of that into his own formula that beauty is the
perfection of sensitive cognition he is saying that beauty lies
not—or as his subsequent practice suggests, not just—in
the representation of some objective perfection in a form accessible
to our senses, but rather—or also—in the exploitation of
the specific possibilities of sensible representation for their own
sake. In other words, there is potential for beauty in the form of a
work as well as in its content because its form can be pleasing to our
complex capacity for sensible representation—the analogon
rationis—just as its content can be pleasing to our
theoretical or practical reason itself. The satisfaction of those
mental powers summed up in the analogon rationis is a source
of pleasure in its own right.

What does this mean in practice? Baumgarten's recognition of the
perfection of sensible cognition as well as the perfection of what is
represented as a distinct source of pleasure in beauty leads him to
recognize not just one but in fact three different potential sources
of beauty in a work of art: “the harmony of the thoughts insofar
as we abstract from their order and their signs,” or means of
expression; “the harmony of the order in which we meditate upon
the beautifully thought content,” and “the harmony of the
signs” or means of expression “among themselves and with
the content and the order of the content” (Aesthetica,
§§18–20). Here Baumgarten is importing the traditional
rhetorical concepts of inventio, dispositio
and elocutio into his system, and conceiving of the latter
two, the harmony of the thoughts and the harmony of the expression
with the thoughts, as the dimensions in which the potentials for
pleasure within our distinctively sensible manner of representing and
thinking are realized. He thus recognizes those aspects of works of
art, which were touched upon only in passing by Wolff and Gottsched,
as sources of pleasure internal to works of art that are equally
significant with the pleasure that arises from the content of works,
considered as representations of perfections outside of the works
themselves. The three main sections of Baumgarten's planned project,
the “heuristic,” “methodology,” and
“semiotics” were intended to cover these three sources of
pleasure in works of art. (see Aesthetica, §13).

As it happened, Baumgarten did not live to complete even the first of
these three parts. Further, the material he did complete suggests that
he may have been more successful in making conceptual space for the
appreciation of the particularly sensible aspects of art than in
substantively changing how art is actually experienced. What
Baumgarten does is to take a list of the categories of the perfections
of the content of logical or scientific cognition and construct a
parallel list by adding the adjective “sensible” to them
to arrive at a list of sensible or aesthetic perfections (and Meier
makes a similar addition to lists of the perfections of the
organization and expression of scientific knowledge). Nevertheless,
some of Baumgarten's categories of aesthetic qualities are
important. The list of the perfections of every kind of cognition that
Baumgarten gives in the first chapter of the Aesthetica is
“wealth, magnitude, truth, clarity, and liveliness”
(ubertas, magnitudo, veritas, claritas,
certitudo
et vita cognitionis), and thus beauty consists in the aesthetic
versions of these perfections (Aesthetica,
§§22–25).

However, in his classroom lectures on the Aesthetica,
Baumgarten particularly emphasized the moral magnitude of the
subject matter of works of art as a major source of our pleasure in
them, and there mentions that works of art will therefore be touching,
that is to say, emotionally moving. Baumgarten stressed that the moral
content of a work of art is only one source of beauty, and that a work
of art can be beautiful without any moral grandeur.
“[A]esthetic dignity,” he claimed, “belongs to
aesthetic magnitude as a part to the whole,” but if a work of
art represents moral agents then it cannot be maximally beautiful
without representing moral dignity, and it certainly cannot be
beautiful if it conveys an attitude contrary to morality. What is
important here, finally, is the moral standing of what is contained in
the work of art, not the actual morality of the artist himself.

Baumgarten did not extensively develop his comment that art must be
touching, but this became central to Meier's aesthetics. In his early
work on the emotions, Meier emphasized that aesthetics should deal
with the passions because they have a “strong influence on
sensible cognition.” His position is not just that the passions
have influence on sensible cognition, but that they are themselves a
great source of sensible pleasure, and that it is therefore part of
the aim of art to arouse them. Meier analyzes the passions, in spite
of their name (the German term Leidenschaft, like the
Latin passio, etymologically means something that happens to
someone rather than something that one does, an actio), as a
form of mental activity: they are “efforts or strivings of the
soul” that result in a desire or an aversion, more precisely
particularly strong and firm desires or aversions
(Meier, Gemüthsbewegungen, §27, p. 30). This might
lead one to expect that desires and aversions can be sources of great
pleasure or displeasure, depending upon whether they are realized or
not, but Meier goes on to argue that “all emotions, the
disagreeable ones not excluded, produce a gratification,”
because they are active states or perfections of the soul, and
“whenever the soul feels a perfection in itself, it is sensitive
of a gratification.” And because they are so strong, the
passions, whether desires or aversions, are those among our mental
states that make us most aware of our own mental activity, and
therefore are actually the strongest source of pleasure for us:

in the passions almost the entire lower power of
cognition and desire is engaged, that is, almost the entire lower part
of our soul. Thus in the emotions the soul is sensitive of the
strength of its powers, that is, of its perfection. It must therefore
necessarily be gratified with its own strength. It must be joyous when
it feels as much as it can. (Gemüthsbewegungen, §89,
p. 124)

In another essay Meier identifies this feeling of
joy at the activity of our own soul with the category of the
“life of cognition,” and thus makes it a central source
of our pleasure in art.

Living cognition becomes alive through the
sensible representations. The lower powers of the soul, the desires
and aversions, constitute the life of a cognition. Everything that
leaves our powers in peace when we cognize it is a dead
cognition. (Meier, “Daß das Wesen der Dichtkunst in unserer
Natur gegründet ist” (“That the essence of poetry is
grounded in our nature”), in Meier, Frühe Schriften,
Part 3, pp. 160–4, at p. 162)

Art aims for the opposite. Indeed, Meier
continues that it is by arousing our passions that art achieves its
goal of a clear but confused, that is, manifold but densely packed,
cognition. For Meier, moving our emotions is not just some small part
of the beauty of art, as Baumgarten seems to suggest. Instead, the
arousal of our emotions, even ones that considered by themselves
should be disagreeable, is the strongest source of the pleasure at
which art aims because it is the most intense form of mental
activity.

Meier thus departed from the strictly cognitivist aesthetics of Wolff
and connected what he had learned from Baumgarten with the passionate
aesthetics of the French Abbé Du Bos. With his connection of the
pleasure in experiencing emotions to the pleasure of experiencing
mental activity as such he brought Wolffian aesthetics a step closer
to contemporary British aesthetics. Meier thereby prepared the way for
the tremendous influence that British aesthetics would have in Germany
by the end of the 1750s. But while Meier stressed
the activity of the mind and Baumgarten argued that aesthetic
experience is based in an analogue of reason, not reason itself,
neither was quite ready to introduce the idea of the free
play of our mental powers as the fundamental source of our
pleasure in aesthetic experience. Baumgarten mentions play once, but
only to recommend that children be allowed to play in order to develop
their cognitive powers, not as the fundamental source of mature
aesthetic pleasure (Poppe, §55, p. 102). Baumgarten also at least
once characterizes the mental state of aesthetic experience as a form
of harmony: he says that the “aestheticodogmatic” thinker
(by which he means a thinker aiming to express a true doctrine
aesthetically )

should in his striving for truth put that before
the eyes of his audience the truth of which he has known with
certitude and which can be represented in its aesthetic truth on the
basis of the harmony between the upper and lower faculties of
cognition. ( Aesthetica, §573; Schweizer, pp.
254–5)

But the occurrence of this comment in the context
of Baumgarten's discussion of aesthetic truth (or of how truths can
be presented in ways agreeable to the senses) makes clear that with
this reference to “harmony” between the lower and upper
faculties of cognition he is not quite introducing the idea of
a free play between them. That idea would be decisively
introduced into German aesthetics only with Kant's unique synthesis
of the preceding German tradition with the British tradition. Before
that was to happen, however, the ideas, emphasized more by Meier
although already suggested by Baumgarten, that art aims at arousing
our emotions and at the pleasurable activity of the mind, and at the
former as an instance of the latter, would be further developed by an
intervening generation of German thinkers. Let us now turn to some of
those.

In a review of Meier's 1757 Extract from the Foundations of all
fine Arts and Sciences, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86)
rejected what he took to be the excessively abstract and a
priori method of Baumgarten and Meier, writing that:

Just as little as the philosopher can discover the appearances of
nature, without examples from experience, merely through a
priori inferences, so little can he establish appearances in the
beautiful world, if one can thus express oneself, without diligent
observations. The securest path of all, just as in the theory of
nature, is this: One must assume certain experiences, explain their
ground through an hypothesis, then test this hypothesis against
experiences from a quite different species, and only assume those
hypotheses to be general principles which have thus held their ground;
one must finally seek to explain these principles in the theory of
nature through the nature of bodies and motion, but
in aesthetics through the nature of the lower powers of our
soul. (Review of Meier, pp. 197–8)

Yet the reference to the “lower powers of the soul” in the
final line of the quotation suggests that Mendelssohn will continue to
work within the general paradigm of Wolffian philosophy himself. He
certainly does, but what he aims to do is to show that the perfections
that can be realized in aesthetic experience are both more positive
and more complicated than those recognized by
Baumgarten. Mendelssohn's method allows him to recognize that all of
our aesthetic experiences draw on a range of mental and even physical
resources, and that because of this many aesthetic experiences can be
understood only as “mixed” rather than simple
feelings. Mendelssohn's analysis of the complexity of aesthetic
experience places more emphasis on the powers of mind and body
involved in such experience than on the objective perfections that art
may represent or nature contain. His account further prepares the
ground for the full-blown theory of aesthetic experience as based in a
play of our powers that will subsequently be achieved by Kant and
Schiller. But in his emphasis on the role of the body as well as the
mind in aesthetic experience, Mendelssohn goes beyond his
successors.

Mendelssohn followed his rabbi from Dessau to Berlin at the age of
fourteen. At twenty-one, he became a tutor in the home of a Jewish
silk manufacturer, at twenty-five his accountant, subsequently his
manager, and finally a partner in the business, in which he would work
full-time for the rest of his life. But by twenty-five Mendelssohn had
also mastered not only literary German but Greek, Latin, French, and
English as well as a vast range of literature and philosophy in all
those languages. He had also become friends with the critic and
playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the writer and publisher
Friedrich Nicolai, and begun an active publishing career. In 1755,
before he turned twenty-six, Mendelssohn published Philosophical
Dialogues on the model of Shaftesbury, On Sentiments,
and, with Lessing, Pope, a Metaphysician! The next year he
published Thoughts on Probability and a translation of
Rousseau's second discourse On the Origins of
Inequality. From 1756 to 1759 he collaborated with Lessing and
Nicolai on the Library of Fine Sciences and Liberal Arts, for
which he wrote two dozen reviews of new works in aesthetics and
literature, and from 1759 to 1765 he contributed nearly one hundred
reviews to Nicolai's Letters concerning the newest
Literature, discussing works not only in aesthetics and
literature but also metaphysics, mathematics, natural science, and
politics (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5.1 (1991),
pp. 5–676). In 1761 he published the first edition of
his Philosophical Writings, mostly on aesthetics, and in 1763
he took first place in a Prussian Academy of Sciences essay
competition for an essay on Evidence in Metaphysical
Sciences, beating out the entry by Kant. But as a Jew, he was
denied entrance to the Academy by the “enlightened”
Frederick the Great, even though he had the strong support of its
members. In 1767, Mendelssohn published Phaedo: or on the
Immortality of the Soul, loosely based on Plato's dialogue of the
same name, an immensely popular work. In the 1770s, after the onset of
a “nervous debility” that he would henceforth claim
prevented him from serious philosophical work, Mendelssohn began a
translation of the Pentatuech and Psalms into modern German (but
printed in Hebrew characters) that he hoped would preserve the Jewish
religion while simultaneously facilitating the assimilation of Jews
into German culture and society. His masterpiece Jerusalem, or on
Religious Power and Judaism, in which he argued for the civil
rights of the Jews by arguing that the state had no right to recognize
any religion at all and therefore must allow all religions freedom
from interference, was published in 1783. In 1785, he returned to
philosophy one last time with Morning Lessons, a magisterial
summary of his own version of Wolffianism. By this time, however, he
was caught up in a strenuous controversy with the fideist philosopher
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi over whether his lifelong friend Lessing had
been a Spinozist. In the midst of this controversy he died of a stroke
in January, 1786, at the age of fifty-six.

Mendelssohn worked within the framework of Wolffian metaphysics and
psychology, and thus he accepted the definition of sensible perception
as clear but confused cognition. He accepted Wolff's explanation that
pleasure arises in the sensible perception of perfection, but also
Baumgarten's transformation of that formula into the explanation of
beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition: in Mendelssohn's
terms, “the essence of the fine arts and sciences consists in an
artful, sensibly perfect representation or in a sensible perfection
represented by art” (“On the Main Principles of the Fine
Arts and Sciences” (1757), Philosophical Writings,
pp. 172–3). But Mendelssohn vigorously rejected any
interpretation of the Wolffian premise according to which the
confusion of sensible perception itself could be the source of our
pleasure in it. For Mendelssohn, any “pure gratification of the
soul must be grounded in the positive powers of our soul and not in
its incapacity, not in the limitation of those original powers”
(On Sentiments, Fourth Letter; Philosophical
Writings, p. 19). Further, “neither fully distinct nor
fully obscure concepts are compatible with the feeling of
beauty,” for what is required is that an object offers enough
“extensive clarity,” that is, richness and variety, to
stimulate us, but enough unity so that we can easily take it in as a
whole (On Sentiments, Third Letter, Philosophical
Writings, pp. 14–15). Mendelssohn's explicit thesis is that
while the parts of an object must be distinct enough to allow one to
have a sense of their variety but dense enough to allow one to grasp
them together with equilibrium and proportion, it is the latter that
is the source of our pleasure. It might seem a stretch to read him as
also suggesting that it is the play of the mind back and forth between
its perception of the parts and its grasp of the whole that is
pleasant. But he will argue that the exercise of various of our
powers, indeed as we are about to see bodily as well as mental powers,
is itself a perfection that we enjoy, so this might at least point
toward the idea that the source of pleasure in beauty is the free play
of the those powers.

While rejecting any interpretation of obscurity or confusion as itself
the source of our pleasure in beauty (On Sentiments, note
h; Philosophical Writings, p. 79), Mendelssohn also rejects
the idea of the Abbé Du Bos (and of Meier's theory of the emotions)
that it is the mere arousal of feelings as such that is the aim of art
(On Sentiments, Conclusion; Philosophical Writings,
p. 71), as well as the idea of Charles Batteux that “the
imitation of nature is the general means by which the fine arts please
us, and [that] it is possible to derive all particular rules of the
fine arts and sciences from this single principle” (“On
the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and
Sciences”, Philosophical Writings, p. 170). Yet
Mendelssohn no more rejects the idea that works of art do arouse our
emotions and that they are, at least in many cases, imitations of
nature than he rejects the idea that the perception of perfection and
the perfection of perception is central to our experience of beauty
and other aesthetic properties. So how does he fit all of these ideas
together into his own distinctive theory?

Mendelssohn never presented his aesthetic theory in a full-length
treatise. His most systematic presentation, the 1757 essay “On
the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences,” discusses
only three out of the four axes of potential perfection that he finds
in the complete aesthetic experience. We therefore need to supplement
what we can glean from this essay with suggestions from On
Sentiments and the Rhapsody, or addition to the Letters on
Sentiments that he added to his 1761 collection. The four axes
that Mendelssohn identifies are the perfection in the object of the
aesthetic experience, typically the perfection of what is depicted by
a work of art but not always, since some arts, such as music and
architecture, and all of nature are not mimetic at all; the perfection
of our own perceptual capacities in the experience of an object, the
“perfection of sensible cognition” that he adopted from
Baumgarten; the perfection of our bodily condition that can
be produced through the effect of our mental condition on our body, a
dimension lacking from all previous accounts in the German rationalist
tradition but perhaps inspired by Mendelssohn's acquaintance with
Edmund Burke's account of the physiology of our feelings of the
beautiful and the sublime (itself perhaps building upon the common
property of David Hartley's 1749 Observations on Man); and
finally, the perfection of the artistry that has gone into the
production of an object, whether human artistry in the case of a work
of art or divine artistry in the case of the beauties of
nature. Perfection along any of these axes is a potential source of
pleasure in the experience of an object, and the effect of these
sources of pleasure can be additive, each increasing our pleasure in
the same object. But these multiple dimensions to our pleasure in
objects also create the possibility of the “mixed
emotions” that we experience in the artistic representation of
unpleasant or tragic objects, because in those cases our pleasure in
the mental activity stimulated by the work of art, the pleasant effect
of that on the body, and our admiration of the artistry that has gone
into the object can outweigh any pain associated with the depicted
content of the work.

Mendelssohn's characterization of the intrinsic perfection of objects
in nature and thus of the objects depicted in representational art
follows in the path already marked out by Wolff: the perfection of an
object lies in the order, symmetry, and rational coherence of its
parts, and its beauty lies in that perfection insofar as it can be
grasped in sensible cognition. Thus in On Sentiments
Mendelssohn writes that we

call the structure of
the world beautiful in the proper sense of the term when the
imagination orders its chief parts in as splendid a symmetry as that
of the order that reason and perception teach us that they possess
outside us. (On Sentiments, Third Letter; Philosophical
Writings, p. 15)

In the case of natural objects, this order is
comprised by both the internal organization of an object to suit its
overall goal and the part that the particular object plays in nature
as a whole. In the “Main Principles,” Mendelssohn goes
beyond this formalistic characterization of perfection and offers a
more concrete list of the kinds of things that count as perfections
in objects, whether objects in nature enjoyed in their own right or
objects in nature enjoyed through the artistic depiction of them,
which provide “the first level of satisfaction and
dissatisfaction which alternately accompany all our
representations.” Here he says that

Everything capable of being represented to the senses as a perfection
could also present an object of beauty. Belonging here are all the
perfections of external forms, that is, the lines, surfaces, and
bodies and their movements and changes; the harmony of the multiple
sounds and colors; the order in the parts of a whole, their
similarity, variety, and harmony; their transposition and
transformation into other forms; all the capabilities of our soul, all
the skills of our body. Even the perfections of our external state
(under which honor, comfort, and riches are to be understood) cannot
be excepted from this if they are fit to be represented in a way that
is apparent to the senses. (“Main
Principles”: Philosophical Writings,
p. 172)

When Mendelssohn refers to the capabilities of our soul and the skills
of our body here, he is referring to them as objects for depiction or
description in a work of art, thus as part of the content of works of
art. This is how he fits into his model the representation of human
intentions, actions, and responses to them, which are the subject
matter of most mimetic art.

The next axis of perfection that Mendelssohn considers is the state of
our mind in response to perfection or imperfection in a real or
represented object. His clearest treatment of this may come in
the Rhapsody, which begins by taking up the question of how
we can be “powerfully attracted to the representation” of
something unpleasant. Mendelssohn answers this question this by saying
that

Each individual representation stands in a twofold relation. It is
related, at once, to the matter before it as its object (of which it
is a picture or copy) and then to the soul or the thinking subject (of
which it constitutes a determination). As a determination of the soul,
many a representation can have something pleasant about it although,
as a picture of the object, it is accompanied by disapproval and a
feeling of repugnance. (Rhapsody; Philosophical
Writings, p. 132)

Several points about this passage need comment. First, while by
“representation” (Vorstellung) here Mendelssohn
means a mental state that represents something other than itself and
not an external object such as a painting or a poem that depicts or
describes something, a mental representation can of course indirectly
represent an external object that is not directly present to it but is
indirectly presented to it by an external representation such as a
painting or a poem which is its direct external object, and that is
indeed how artistic representation typically works. Second, while
Mendelssohn here refers to a mental representation as a
“determination” (Bestimmung) or property of the
mind, his further discussion suggests that he is actually thinking of
representation as a kind of mental activity, an activity
involving our capacities for both knowing and desiring, and that we
enjoy representation because we enjoy mental activity. Thus he
continues that while “elements of perfection” in a thing
are “satisfying and comfortable to us” while
“elements of imperfection…are perceived with
dissatisfaction,”

In relation to the thinking subject, the soul, on the other hand,
perceiving and cognizing the features as well as testifying to
enjoying them or not constitutes something actual
[Sachliches] that is posited in the soul, an affirmative
determination of the soul. Hence every representation, at least in
relation to the subject, as an affirmative predicate of the thinking
entity, must have something about it that we like. For even the
picture of the deficiency of the object, just like the expression of
discontent with it, are not deficiencies on the part of the thinking
entity, but rather affirmative and actual determinations of
it….considered as a representation, a picture within us that
engages the soul's capacities of knowing and desiring, the
representation of what is evil is itself an element of the soul's
perfection and brings with it something quite pleasant that we by no
means would prefer not to feel than to
feel. (Rhapsody; Philosophical Writings, pp.
133–4)

It is striking how Mendelssohn writes here in gerundives and
infinitives rather than in substantives in order to convey a sense of
mental activity: recognizing and approving or
even disapproving are actions of the mind
in knowing and desiring. We enjoy that mental
activity, even when it is stimulated by the representation of
something of which we disapprove, and we enjoy the representation even
of something evil as long as our pleasure in the activity of
representing is not overwhelmed by disapproval of the object of the
representation.

The contrast between perfection or imperfection in the content of a
representation and the enjoyable activity of the mind in representing
that content is the heart of Mendelssohn's theory, so we can interrupt
our catalogue of all four of the axes of perfection that he recognizes
for some comments on this contrast. The first thing to be noticed is
that Mendelssohn here emphasizes the engagement of our powers of both
knowing and desiring in aesthetic experience, not merely the power of
knowing. This gives him room to add an emphasis on our enjoyment of
the arousal of our emotions to Baumgarten's emphasis on our enjoyment
of the perfection of sensible cognition. Now, as we saw, Baumgarten in
fact made room for this dimension of aesthetic experience in his
early Meditations on Poetry, even though he did not take it
up again in the Aesthetica, and Meier emphasized it in
several of his works. But Mendelssohn adds a crucial point here,
leading to a fundamental revision in the significance of artistic
imitation: in order for us to enjoy the mixed emotions in a pleasing
representation of something that is objectively displeasing, our sense
of the difference between the represented content and our act
of representing it cannot be allowed to collapse, and the rôle of
artistic imitation is precisely to create enough distance
between our representation and its object to allow us to enjoy the
representation rather than to collapse that space by creating
the illusion that we are in the actual presence of the
depicted object. Mendelssohn writes,

If the objects gets too close to us, if we regard
it as a part of us or even as ourselves, the pleasant character of the
representation completely disappears, and the relation to the subject
immediately becomes an unpleasant relation to us since here subject
and object collapse, as it were, into one
another. (Rhapsody; Philosophical Writings, p. 134)

He then says that a

means of rendering the most terrifying events
pleasant to gentle minds is the imitation by art, on the stage, on the
canvas, and in marble, since an inner consciousness that we have an
imitation and nothing genuine before our eyes moderates the strength
of the objective disgust and, as it were, elevates the subjective side
of the representation. (Rhapsody; Philosophical
Writings, p. 138)

Thus, contrary to Wolff, Mendelssohn does not
suppose that what we enjoy in imitation is accuracy of representation
taken to the point of illusion, but rather the room for the experience
of our own mental activity that the knowledge that the depicted object
is only being imitated allows.

In fact, Mendelssohn's analysis of our mixed emotions in the
experience of tragedy is even more subtle than this, for a further
aspect of it is that our knowledge that we are experiencing
represented rather than real people allows us to enjoy sympathy with
the perfections of the noble characters who are depicted rather than
pity at their weaknesses or at the fate that overcomes them. But
rather than pursuing this, I want to make to make one further point
about Mendelssohn's general account of our enjoyment of the engagement
of our powers of knowing and desiring. This explanation of a
fundamental source of aesthetic pleasure as arising from the
engagement of those two powers might seem to conflict with
Mendelssohn's influential ascription of aesthetic pleasure to
a third faculty, the “faculty of approval,”
distinguished from both the “faculty of cognition” and the
“faculty of desire.” Mendelssohn introduces this third
faculty in the Morning Lessons, a quarter-century after his
early writings on aesthetics. There he says that

One usually divides the faculties of the soul into the faculty of
cognition and the faculty of desire, and assigns the sentiment of
pleasure and displeasure to the faculty of desire. But it seems to me
that between knowing and desiring lies the approving, the assent, the
satisfaction of the soul, which is actually quite remote from
desire. We contemplate the beauty of nature and of art, without the
least arousal of desire, with gratification and satisfaction. It
seems to be a particular mark of beauty that we contemplate it with
quiet satisfaction; that it pleases, even if we do not possess it, and
that is remote from the urge to possess it. (Morgenstunden,
Lesson VII, p. 70)

Mendelssohns' introduction of a faculty of approval in 1785 may have
been influential for Kant's elevation of judgment to a faculty on a
par with understanding and reason, signaled in his letter of December
25, 1787, to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, a decisive step in the genesis of
the third critique. But as far as Mendelssohn is concerned, his
explanation of the faculty of approval shows that his basic theory has
not changed. By introducing this faculty, he wants to emphasize that
the experience of beauty or other aesthetic qualities is not actual
knowledge, nor does it lead to specific desires and actions (except
perhaps the desire to be able to continue contemplating an object
already found to have been beautiful). But what satisfies the faculty
of approval is still the activity of the other mental powers. Thus
Mendelssohn writes, first with reference to the power of cognition but
then with reference to desire as well, that

We can consider the cognition of the soul in
different respects; either in so far as it is true or false, which I
call the material aspect in cognition; or in so far as arouses
pleasure or displeasure, has as its consequence the approval or
disapproval of the soul, and this can be called the formal aspect in
cognition.

And he explains the latter aspect precisely in
terms of mental activity:

Every concept, in so far as it is merely thinkable, has something that
pleases the soul, that occupies its activity, and is thus cognized by
it with satisfaction and approval….where the soul finds more
satisfaction in one concept than in another, more agreeable
occupation, then can it prefer the former to the latter. In this
comparison and in the preference that we give to an object consists
the essence of the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the evil, the
perfect and the imperfect. What we cognize as the best in this
comparison works on our faculty of desire and stimulates it, where it
finds no resistance, to activity. This is the side on which the
faculty of approval touches demand or desire. (Morgenstunden,
Lesson VII, pp. 72–3)

Ordinarily, the faculty of cognition aims at truth, and the faculty of
desire aims at action. The faculty of approval, however, aims just for
the pleasing activity of the other two faculties without their usual
results. The faculty of approval should be distinguished from the
faculties of cognition and desire, since it does not aim at the same
results they do. But it is itself satisfied by creations that set
those faculties into an “agreeable play.” This is not a
breach with Mendelssohn's earlier doctrine, but an explanation of
it. Mendelssohn's explicit introduction of the concept of play here,
finally, may be just as influential for the development of Kant's
aesthetics as is his insistence that the faculty of approval does not
lead to actual knowledge or actual desire.

In the Morning Lessons Mendelssohn does not emphasize that
the free play of the mind has a pleasing effect on the body, but he
does in his earlier writings, so let us now return to this third item
in Mendelssohn's catalogue of the axes of perfection in aesthetic
experience. This is the effect of the activity of the mind in
aesthetic experience on the state of the body, a point that
Mendelssohn emphasizes in On Sentiments and
the Rhapsody although not in the essay on the “Main
Principles.” Mendelssohn says that if

each sensible rapture, each improved condition of
the state of our body, fills the soul with the sensible representation
of a perfection, then every sensible representation must also, in
turn, bring with it some well-being of the body…And in this way
a pleasant emotion [Affekt] arises.

He distinguishes between a “sensible
rapture” (sinnliche Wollust) and an emotion because the
former begins in a part of a body, that is, with an actual external
perception, while the latter “arises in the brain itself,”
but in either case the feeling of the pleasure “arrange[s] the
fibers of the brain into an appropriate tone, employing them without
fatiguing them,” and then “The brain communicates this
harmonious tension to nerves of the other parts of the body and the
body becomes comfortable” (On Sentiments, Twelfth
Letter; Philosophical Writings, p. 53). In other words,
although as a rationalist metaphysician Mendelssohn maintains the
formal distinction between the mind and the body (the mind is simple
and indivisible, while body is essentially divisible), as a
psychologist and aesthetician he nevertheless sees them as in the most
intimate interaction, with the perception of harmony by the body
infusing the mind with a pleasant sense of harmony that then further
stimulates the harmonious condition of the body.

Finally, the “Main Principles” introduce a fourth source
of perfection and therefore pleasure in the aesthetic experience,
namely our appreciation of the artistry that is manifested in the
production of a beautiful object. In explaining this source of
pleasure, Mendelssohn also makes another revision to the traditional
theory that it is resemblance alone that is the source of our pleasure
in imitation, because resemblance is easily produced by means far less
complex and admirable than all of the faculties that go into
artistry—a point that Plato had already made when he had
Socrates argue that if it is mere imitation that the artist were
after, he could just go around with a mirror
(Plato, Republic, Book X, 596d–e):

All works of art are visible imprints of the artist's abilities which,
so to speak, put his entire soul on display and make it known to
us. This perfection of spirit arouses an uncommonly greater pleasure
than mere similarity, because it is more worthy and far more complex
than similarity. It is all the more worthy the more that the
perfection of rational beings is elevated above the perfection of
lifeless things, and also more complex because many abilities of the
soul and often diverse skills of the external limbs as well are
required for a beautiful imitation. We find more to admire in a rose
by Huysum than in the image that every river can reflect of
this queen of the flowers; and the most enchanting landscape in
a camera obscura does not charm us as much as it can through
the brush of a great landscape painter. (“Main
Principles”; Philosophical Writings,
p. 174)

Mendelssohn explicitly recognizes the physical skills as well as the
mental powers of the artist as among the perfections that we
indirectly admire in admiring the work of art; this is another example
of his recognition of the close connection between mind and body in
spite of their metaphysical distinction. He also stresses the
superiority of artistic representation over the mere imitation of
nature by observing that the artist can create “ideal
beauty” by gathering

together in a single viewpoint what nature has
diffusely strewn among various objects, for himself a whole from this
and taking the trouble to represent it just as nature would have
represented it if the beauty of this limited object had been its sole
purpose. (“Main Principles”; Philosophical
Writings, p. 176)

However, although human artistry may concentrate beauty more than
nature does, that hardly means that artistic beauty is in all regards
superior to natural beauty. Mendelssohn concludes the paragraph just
cited by saying that “the most perfect, ideal beauty…is
to be encountered nowhere in nature other than in the whole and is
perhaps never fully to be attained in the works of art.” That
is, the beauty of nature as a whole exceeds the beauty of any work of
art, and accordingly our admiration for the skill and genius of any
human artist must be exceeded by our admiration for and pleasure in
the artistry that lies behind nature as a whole.

Mendelssohn concludes the essay on the “Main Principles of the
Fine Arts and Sciences” with a brief but pregnant division of
the arts. The basis of his division is a distinction between
“natural” and “arbitrary” signs, which has
precedents in Du Bos, in Leibniz and Wolff, and beyond all of them in
St. Augustine. Signs are natural “if the combination of the
subject matter signified is grounded in the very properties of what is
designated,” as smoke is a natural product of fire or “The
passions are, by their very nature, connected with certain movements
in our limbs as well as with certain sounds and gestures”
(“Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, p.
177). Signs are arbitrary that “by their very nature have
nothing in common with the designated subject matter, but have
nevertheless been arbitrarily assumed as signs for it,” such as
the “articulated sounds of all languages, the letters, the
hieroglyphic signs of the ancients, and some allegorical images”
(“Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, pp.
177–8). The arbitrary signs could also be called
conventional. Mendelssohn's chief distinction is then between those
arts that convey their content by artificial signs, namely poetry and
rhetoric, and those arts that employ natural signs, which convey both
reference to content and the expression of feeling through natural
signs and do “not presuppose anything arbitrary in order to be
understood,” namely painting, sculpture, music, dance, and even
architecture insofar as it conveys any meaning and expression. In
fact, Mendelssohn distinguishes between the fine arts and the
beautiful sciences, or between beaux arts and belles
lettres, on this basis: the fine arts employ natural signs, and
the beautiful sciences or belles lettres employ arbitrary or
conventional signs (“Main Principles”; Philosophical
Writings, pp. 178–9). Among the belles lettres,
poetry and rhetoric are distinguished by the fact that “The
main, ultimate purpose of poetry is to please by means of a sensibly
perfect discourse, while that of rhetoric is to persuade by means of a
sensibly perfect discourse.” Mendelssohn does not explain why
the fact that poetry and rhetoric employ artificial rather than
natural signs entitles them to be called sciences rather than arts;
perhaps what he has in mind is that since the meanings of arbitrary
signs can be codified, there is more room for precision in the
interpretation of poetry and rhetoric than there is in the various
fine arts (with the exception of their allegorical or iconographical
aspects, which as Mendelssohn has suggested are more like arbitrary
than natural signs). In the case of rhetoric, moreover, there was a
long tradition going back to antiquity of formulating rules for how
persuasion can be achieved, and perhaps this made it seem like more of
a science than an art to Mendelssohn.

Be this as it may, the main point of Mendelssohn's distinction is that
because its signs are arbitrary and can therefore be associated with
any conceivable content, “the poet can express everything of
which our soul can have a clear concept,” while the arts that
employ natural signs are limited to the expression of those ideas and
emotions the natural signs for which can be replicated in their
specific media; each of these arts “must content itself with
that portion of natural signs that it can express by means of the
senses,” or more precisely by means of its particular way of
engaging the senses. For example, “Music, the expression of
which takes place by means of inarticulate sounds,” although it
can express both the general ideas of harmony and all of the
particular “inclinations and passions of the human soul which
tend to make themselves known by means of sounds,” cannot
possibly indicate particular concepts of objects such as “the
concept of a rose, a poplar tree, and so on, just as it is impossible
for painting to represent a musical chord to us” (“Main
Principles”; Philosophical Writings, pp. 178–9).
A similar point would be made a century later by the music critic
Eduard Hanslick.

Mendelssohn next assumes that only hearing and sight can convey
natural signs, and then observes that

the natural signs that affect the sense of sight
can be represented either successively or alongside one another, that
is to say, they can express beauty either through movement or through
forms. (“Main Principles”; Philosophical
Writings, p. 179)

The art of dance employs movements that naturally
express human feelings and emotions, while the arts of painting and
sculpture must “express beauties that are alongside one
another” through line, color, and shape. This leads Mendelssohn
to the point that although works of music, dance, and for that matter
poetry themselves take place through a succession of moments and can
thereby convey a succession of movements, painting and sculpture can
represent only a single moment in the history of their objects. The
painter and sculptor must therefore

choose the instant that is most favorable to their purpose. They must
assemble the entire action into a single perspective and divide it up
with a great deal of understanding. In this instant everything must be
rich in thoughts and so full of meaning that every accompanying
concept makes its own contribution to the required meaning. When we
view such a painting [or sculpture] with due attention, our senses are
all at once inspired, all the abilities of our soul suddenly
enlivened, and the imagination can from the present infer the past and
reliably anticipate the future. (“Main
Principles”; Philosophical Writings,
pp. 180–1)

Mendelssohn's thesis that the visual arts must convey all of their
content through their representation of an object at a single moment
while other arts can represent movements and actions in, as we would
say, real time, would be used as a premise in a famous controversy
between his friend Lessing and the renowned historian of ancient art
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, to which we will turn in a moment. But
before doing so, we must complete our survey of Mendelssohn's
aesthetics with a comment on his discussion of the sublime.

Mendelssohn was instrumental in introducing the topic of the sublime
into German aesthetics, publishing a lengthy review of Burke's book on
the beautiful and the sublime in 1758, just a year after it appeared
in England (reprinted in Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften,
volume 4, pp. 216–36), as well as an essay “On the Sublime
and Naïve in the Fine Sciences” in the same year. In the latter
essay, Mendelssohn makes a number of points that will become central
to the subsequent German discussion of the sublime, especially in
Kant. His premise, not surprisingly, is that “The sentiment
produced by the sublime is a composite one” (“On the
Sublime and the Naïve in the Fine Sciences”; Philosophical
Writings, p. 195). For one thing, it may be produced by the
perception or thought of an “immensity of extended
magnitude” or of an “immensity of strength or unextended
magnitude” (“The Sublime and
Naïve”; Philosophical Writings, p. 194)—by the
sight, image, or thought of something vastly big or of something
vastly powerful. This distinction anticipates Kant's subsequent
distinction between the “mathematical” and the
“dynamical” sublime, and while it was not uncommon in
British discussions of the sublime, Mendelssohn may have been Kant's
source for it. Mendelssohn then says that either immensity of size or
immensity of strength first “captures our attention” and
“arouses a sweet shudder that rushes through every fiber of our
being…giving wings to the imagination to press further and
further without stopping.” “All these sentiments blend
together in the soul,” becoming “a single phenomenon which
we call awe” (loc. cit.). But the feeling of awe at
immensity does not yet complete the complex experience of the sublime;
for that, there must also be an element of admiration at a
perfection—for remember that Mendelssohn's project is still to
ground all aesthetic experience on the underlying principle of
pleasure in perfection. So the immensity which inspires us with awe
must also be interpreted as a manifestation of perfection. Mendelssohn
then invokes the same distinction he employed in his discussion of
artistry. The immensity which fills us with awe may be either a
product of divine artistry, in which case

the properties of the Supreme Being which we
recognize in his works inspire the most ecstatic awe and admiration
because they surpass everything that we can conceive as enormous,
perfect, or sublime,

or it can be due to human artistry. In that case
we may not find the represented object so extraordinary but feel with
pleasure how “the artist possesses the skill of elevating its
properties and showing them in an uncommon light,” or
alternatively we may be awed by both the represented object and the
divine artistry that lies behind it and by the “great wit,
genius, imagination, and capacities of the soul” of the human
artist who produces the image of the work of divine artistry.

What especially pleases us in the case of art,
considered as art, is the reference to the spiritual gifts of the
artist which make themselves visibly known. If they bear the
characteristics of an uncommon genius…then they inspire awe on
our part. (“The Sublime and Naïve”; Philosophical
Writings, pp. 196–7)

We may now turn to the famous controversy between Lessing and
Winckelmann, built upon Mendelssohn's distinction between the arts of
form and the arts of movement.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the son of a cobbler
from Prussia, studied at Halle and Jena, and became a school
teacher. But at thirty-one he got a position as a librarian for a
nobleman in Dresden, and gained access to the court of the Elector
of Saxony, home of one of the great art collections of Europe, and
also a Catholic court that ultimately gave him access to Rome. He
established his reputation in 1755 with an essay “On the
Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture.” He moved
to Rome later that year, in the service of the Papal Nuncio to the
Saxon court, and in 1758 entered the service of Cardinal Allessandro
Albani, the nephew of Pope Clement XI and owner of a great
collection of antiquities. In 1764 Winckelmann published The
History of Ancient Art to great acclaim. He was working on a
revision of it when he was murdered in Trieste in June of 1768,
while returning to Rome from Vienna, where the Empress Maria Theresa
had awarded him a collection of gold and silver medallions.

Winckelmann spent his two years in Halle (1738–40) while
Baumgarten was still teaching there and Meier was also a student. But
his writing offers no evidence that he knew their
works. His History of Ancient Art does cite Du Bos, Batteux,
and the essays of Hume, however, and he had clearly absorbed some of
the most general ideas of eighteenth-century aesthetics. A 1763 essay
“On the Capacity for the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art, and
on Instruction in it” suggests several of the premises assumed
throughout his work on ancient art history. He shares with Wolff and
Batteux the assumption that art derives its beauty from the imitation
of nature, and derives the most beauty from the imitation of beauty in
nature. Thus he writes that

Art, as an imitator of nature, should always seek
out what is natural for the form of beauty, and should avoid, as much
as is possible, all that is violent, because even the beauty in life
can become displeasing through forced gestures. (“On the
Capacity for the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art,” Essays
on the Philosophy and History of Art, volume I, p. xlvi)

However, Winckelmann believes that natural beauty
itself lies not merely in the superficial appearance of bodies but,
at least in the case of human beauty, is an expression of the thought
and character of persons:

Above all things, one
is to be attentive to the particular, characteristic thoughts in
works of art, which sometimes stand like expensive pearls in a string
of inferior ones, and can get lost among them. Our contemplation
should begin with the effects of the understanding as the most worthy
part of beauty, and from there should descend to the execution

a point that he illustrates with examples from
the paintings of Poussin, Corregio, and Domenichino rather than from
ancient art (“The Sentiment for the Beautiful,” p. xlv).
Winckelmann clearly belongs to the tradition that finds beauty in the
truthful representation of the objective perfections of body and mind,
rather than in the stimulation of the play of the mental powers of the
audience for beauty.

Winckelmann's premises underlie his history of ancient art, the main
claims of which are already evident in his 1755 essay “On the
Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks.” This
essay begins with the claim that “There is but one way for the
moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating
the ancients” (Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of
the Greeks, p. 2; in Essays on the Philosophy and History of
Art, volume I). His topic is thus in the first instance the
imitation of ancient art, not imitation in ancient
art. Winckelmann then attributes the excellent of ancient, that is to
say Greek, art to three factors: first, nature in ancient Greece was
particularly favorable to the development of beautiful bodies; second,
the “natural” way of life in Greece was particularly
favorable to the observation of beautiful bodies and thus to their
imitation in art; and finally, Greek thought and character
were particularly noble, and thus the external beauty of Greek bodies
was an expression of the beauty of the Greek mind as the “most
worthy part of beauty.” The first of these claims is in the
tradition of the emphasis of the influence of climate on human
character and society initiated by Du Bos and continued by many
eighteenth-century thinkers, including Montesquieu in The Spirit
of the Laws (1748).

Winckelmann's second point is that the Greek climate and way of life
were conducive to the development of art. He makes the general claim
that freedom is conducive to the development of art:

Art claims liberty: in vain would nature produce
her noblest offsprings, in a country where rigid laws would choke her
progressive growth, as in Egypt, that pretended parent of sciences and
arts: but in Greece, where, from their earliest youth, the happy
inhabitants were devoted to mirth and pleasure, where narrow-spirited
formality never restrained the liberty of manners, the artist enjoyed
nature without a veil.

Winckelmann then makes the specific point that
freedom from excessive clothing among the Greeks, particularly in
their gymnastic and athletic exercises, gave their artists
unparalleled opportunity to observe and to learn to represent the
beauty of their bodies:

The Gymnasies, where, sheltered by public modesty,
the youths exercised themselves naked, were the schools of
art…. Here beautiful nakedness appeared with such a liveliness
of expression, such truth and variety of situations, such a noble air
of the body, as it would be ridiculous to look for in any hired model
of our academies. (“Imitation,” pp. 9–10)

Winckelmann's reference to expression and
nobility here points the way to his last claim, that above all the
bodily beauty of the Greeks is an expression of their mental and moral
beauty:

The last and most eminent characteristic of the
Greek works is a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in Gesture and
Expression. As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming
surface, a great soul lies sedate beneath the strife of passions in
Greek figures. (“Imitation,” p. 30)

Winckelmann illustrates the last claim with a discussion of the famous
statue of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons being strangled by
the serpents Neptune sent to stifle his warnings against accepting the
“gift” of the Trojan horse. The version of this statue
that was unearthed near Naples in 1506 and quickly acquired by Pope
Julius II for the Vatican, where it has been displayed ever since, is
now thought to be a Roman copy of a Pergamese bronze from the second
century BCE, and may or may not be the same one described by Pliny
(Natural History, XXXV). Winckelmann took it to be a
classical Greek work. He also must have known it only from
illustration when he first wrote about it in “On the Imitation
of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks,” since he moved to
Rome only after that essay was published. Be that as it may,
Winckelmann writes:

'Tis in the face of Laocoön this soul shines with full lustre, not
confined however to the face, amidst the most violent
sufferings. Pangs piercing every muscle, every labouring nerve; pangs
which we almost feel ourselves, while we consider—not the face,
nor the most expressive parts—only the belly contracted by
excruciating pains: these however, I say, exert not themselves with
violence, either in the face or gesture. He pierces not heaven, like
the Laocoön of Virgil; his mouth is rather opened to
discharge an anxious overloaded groan, as Sadolet says; the
struggling body and the supporting mind exert themselves with equal
strength, nay balance all the frame.

Laocoön suffers, but suffers like the Philoctetes
of Sophocles: we weeping feel his pains, but wish for the
hero's strength to support his misery.

The Expression of so great a soul is beyond the force of mere
nature. It was in his own mind the artist was to search for the
strength of spirit with which he marked his marble. Greece enjoyed
artists and philosophers in the same persons; and the wisdom of more
than one Metrodorus directed art, and inspired its figures with more
than common souls.

The last paragraph of this is somewhat contorted: since Laocoön was
not himself a classical Greek, but a pre-classical Trojan, Winckelmann
does not quite attribute the “noble simplicity and quiet
grandeur” that shines through his face even in the midst of his
suffering to him and to nature as it might have been at work in Troy,
but rather to the classical Greek artist whom he supposes did make the
statue. But his basic point remains: since in his view the statue
itself was Greek, the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur of the Greek
soul inevitably manifests itself and elevates these figures caught in
a moment of supreme suffering to the highest level of beauty.

Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art, published nine years
after the essay on imitation, reaffirms his general commitment to
contemporary aesthetics as well as his particular emphasis on a
certain kind of mental condition as the ultimate source of physical
beauty. It nevertheless gives a slightly different and perhaps more
plausible account of the Laocoön statue, which by then he had seen
first-hand. To general statements on beauty as unity and simplicity
(History, p. 196) and the beauty of youthfulness (p. 197)
Winckelmann adds a passage on the expression of inward attitude that
is reminiscent of his description of the “noble simplicity and
quiet grandeur” of the Greeks in the earlier
essay:

Expression is an imitation of the active and suffering states
of our minds and our bodies and of passions as well as
deeds…Stillness is the state most proper to beauty, as it is to
the sea, and experience shows that the most beautiful beings are of a
still and well-mannered nature. (History, p. 204)

But, as noted, in the History
Winckelmann gives a slightly different account of the Laocoön, in
which he suggests that the beauty of the central figure of the work
lies not so much in the nobility of character that is
expressed in spite of Laocoön's agony, but rather in a kind
of harmony between his agony and his nobility:

Laocoön is a being in the greatest pain, fashioned
in the likeness of a man seeking to gather the conscious strength of
his mind and spirit against it…. Beneath the brow, the battle
between pain and resistance, as if concentrated in this one place, is
composed with great wisdom…Thus, where the greatest pain is
expressed, the greatest beauty is also to be
found. (History, pp. 313–14)

This description of the Laocoön has been of great interest to
recent interpreters, but it was Winckelmann's earlier account that
inspired the criticism of Lessing, whose Laocoön: An Essay on
the Limits of Painting and Poetry, although not published until
1766, was clearly begun and largely written before the appearance of
Winckelmann's History in 1764. Lessing's work was thus a
response to the earlier essay (only in chapter 26, almost at the end
of the book, does Lessing say that Winckelmann's History
“has appeared, and I shall not venture another step until I have
read it”). Lessing's book, although part of the larger
eighteenth-century debate about the comparative merits of literature
and the visual arts that builds upon the division of the arts by his
friend Mendelssohn, first argues against Winckelmann that the beauty
of the Laocoön statue comes not from the special nobility of the
Greek soul but from the particular demands of its visual rather than
literary medium.

Lessing published his Laocoön at the midpoint of his varied
literary and intellectual career. Lessing, like Mendelssohn born in
1729, was the oldest of thirteen children of a Saxon pastor, and at
twelve he entered the monastic school at Meissen; at seventeen he went
to Leipzig to study theology, then changed to medicine, and then to
the university at Wittenberg. But at twenty, he left the university
and went to Berlin to make a career as a writer. There he quickly met
among others Voltaire, at that time employed by Frederick the Great,
as well as Mendelssohn. In 1755, Lessing had his great success with
the bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson, which initiated a
new direction in the German theater. In 1758, he started collaborating
with Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai on the Letters concerning
the newest literature. From 1760 to 1765 Lessing worked as
secretary to the governor of Silesia in Breslau, during which time he
wrote Laocoön as well as the comedy Minna von
Barnhelm. He returned to Berlin again in 1765, but, disappointed
in his hopes for the position of Royal Librarian, went to Hamburg in
1767 as director of the National Theater. The program notes he wrote
in that capacity became his Hamburg Dramaturgy, his most
extended critical work. In 1770 Lessing finally found a secure post as
librarian for the great collection of the Dukes of Brunswick in
Wolffenbüttel, where he remained until his death in 1781. There he
wrote the tragedy Emilia Galotti and his famous plea for
religious tolerance in the form of Nathan the Wise, a play
inspired by Mendelssohn. In addition to various theological polemics,
he also published his Education of the Human Race the year
before his death.

The thesis of Laocoön, as already suggested, is that the
character of the famous statue is due not to the nobility of the Greek
mind but to the imperatives of its visual medium. Lessing begins his
work by quoting the same passage from Winckelmann's essay “On
the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks” that
we quoted above (Laocoön, chapter 1, p. 7). He then argues
that the Greek, like anyone else, “felt and feared, and he
expressed his pain and grief,” and that this was not thought to
be incompatible with nobility of soul; he appeals to examples from
Homer's Iliad to prove this point. So he concludes that

if, according to the ancient Greek, crying aloud
when in physical pain is compatible with nobility of soul, then the
desire to express such nobility could not have prevented the artist
from representing the scream in his marble, There must be another
reason why he differs on this point from his rival the
poet. (Laocoön, chapter 1, pp. 9–11)

The reason, Lessing claims, is

that among the ancients beauty was the supreme law
of the visual arts. Once this has been established, it necessarily
follows that whatever else these arts may include must give way
completely if not compatible with beauty, and, if compatible, must at
least be subordinate to it.

In the case of the story of Laocoön, since

The demands of beauty could not be reconciled with
[his] pain in all its disfiguring violence, so it had to be
reduced. The scream had to be softened to a sigh, not because
screaming betrays an ignoble soul, but because it distorts the
features in a disgusting manner. (Laocoön, chapter 1, pp. 15,
17)

Indeed, in a later discussion of the demands of
religion on visual art, Lessing adds that

I should prefer that only those be called works of art in which the
artist had occasion to show himself as such and in which beauty was
his first and ultimate aim. None of the others, which betray too
obvious traces of religious conventions, deserves this name because in
their case the artist did not create for art's sake [weil die
Kunst hier nicht um ihren selbst willen gearbeitet, literally
“because here art did not work for its own sake”], but his
art was merely a handmaid of religion, which stressed meaning more
than beauty in the material subjects it allotted to art for execution.
(Laocoön, chapter 1, pp. 15, 17)

The phrase “art for art's sake” is often thought to be a
nineteenth-century invention, but here Lessing clearly anticipates it,
meaning that at least in the visual arts all other considerations must
be subordinated to the creation of beauty.

Lessing does not appeal to any philosophical theory to back up this
insistence. But his next step is to buttress his argument by borrowing
Mendelssohn's idea that since the visual arts present objects in a
single moment, they must choose that moment carefully, and in
particular they must choose a moment that gives “free
rein” to the imagination. Even if it were to be conceded that
“Truth and expression are art's first law,” which Lessing
is not actually willing to concede, this would still hold. Thus
paintings and sculptures must not represent the moment of the
culmination of an action, which leaves nothing further to the
imagination, but a moment of anticipation which leaves the imagination
free to play with further possibilities (Laocoön, chapter 3,
p. 19). The artist of the Laocoön did not represent his subject at the
moment of his greatest pain and full scream because that would have
foreclosed the free play of the imagination of the audience for the
work. Here Lessing at least tacitly invokes the new theory that the
play of our mental powers rather than the representation of some form
of truth is the fundamental aim of art, or at least visual art.

Lessing continues his argument by turning to the other half of
Mendelssohn's theory, that is, to the claim that poetry is an art that
can represent a succession of events over time rather than one moment
in time. “Accordingly, bodies with their visible properties are
the true subjects of painting,” while, since actions take place
over time, “actions are the true subjects of poetry.”
Thus, “painting too can imitate actions, but only by suggestion
through bodies,” and again “can use only a single moment
of an action in its coexisting compositions and must therefore choose
the one that is most suggestive.” Conversely, in order to
represent a body poetry can only describe an action in which the body
is made, used, or otherwise involved (Laocoön, chapter 16,
pp. 78–9). This leads Lessing to a memorable analysis of some
examples from Homer: “If Homer wants to show us Juno's chariot,
he shows Hebe putting it together piece by piece”; when he
“wants to show us how Agamemnon was dressed, he has the king put
on his garments, one by one,” and, most famously, when he wants
to show us Achilles's shield, he does not describe it “as
finished and complete, but as a shield that is being made”
(Laocoön, chapter 16, p. 80; chapter 18, p. 95).

So far, Lessing has merely rejected Winckelmann's analysis of the
Laocoön statue on the basis of his own insistence that beauty is the
primary aim of visual art as well as on Mendelssohn's distinction
between arts that can represent one moment and arts that can represent
a succession of moments. But he broadens his target when he says, in a
passing discussion of the fact that both Homer and Milton were blind,
that “if the range of my physical sight must be the measure of
my inner vision, I should value the loss of the former in order to
gain freedom from the limitations on the latter”
(Laocoön, chapter 14, p. 74). Here his implication is that
sight actually constrains the imagination, while non-visual
media—in other words, poetry—free the imagination for a
wider play with both ideas and emotions. This point could also be
thought to depend on one of Mendelssohn's ideas, namely his contrast
between natural and arbitrary or conventional signs. Lessing touches
upon this in passing, arguing that although “the symbols of
speech are arbitrary,” the poet actually wants to overcome our
awareness of that fact:

He wants rather to make the ideas he awakens in us
so vivid that at the moment we believe that we feel the real
impressions which the objects of these ideas would produce in us. In
this moment of illusion we should cease to be conscious of the means
which the poet uses for this purpose, that is, his
words. (Laocoön, chapter 17, p. 85)

But while emphasizing that the poet aims to create a vivid response in
us, in particular a vivid emotional response, Lessing fails to mention
Mendelssohn's point that we also need to retain some awareness of the
artificiality rather than reality of the artistic depiction of persons
and actions in order to maintain the distance necessary to allow us to
enjoy the emotions evoked by art rather than being overwhelmed by them
into actual suffering. He does not need to mention this, perhaps, in
the case of the visual arts, since he holds that the visual artist
leaves the audience some freedom of imagination by not depicting the
moment of the greatest suffering of his subject, and this freedom may
afford the necessary distance, but he might have done well to mention
it in the case of poetry.

Lessing thus touches upon the new idea that aesthetic response is
based on the free play of our mental powers stimulated by an object,
in his case always by a work of art, and he exploits several of
Mendelssohn's theoretical tools. He should nevertheless be seen as a
practicing critic using theoretical developments for his own purposes
rather than as a theorist in his own right. However, his criticism
immediately triggered more philosophical aesthetics in response. In
the next section, we shall see how Johann Gottfried Herder reasserted
yet refined an aesthetics of truth beginning with a response to
Lessing, while Johann Georg Sulzer attempted to combine an aesthetics
of truth with an aesthetics of play. Sulzer's combination of the
aesthetics of truth and play would in turn prepare the way for Kant,
while Herder's final work, more than twenty years after he completed
his main work in aesthetics, would be a critique of Kant's
aesthetics. This section will also include a discussion of the
aesthetic theory of Marcus Herz, who was first a student of Kant and
then a friend of Mendelssohn, but who developed an aesthetic theory
that is in interesting ways independent of both.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is most often remembered
for his philosophy of history, expounded with relative brevity in his
1774 work This Too a Philosophy of History for the Education of
Humanity and at great length in his Ideas for the Philosophy
of History of Humanity, published from 1784 to 1791. He is
typically read as having advocated cultural relativism and
historicism against the universalist pretensions of the
Enlightenment—manifested in aesthetics in the search for a
universally valid “standard of taste”—and thus as
having been a forerunner of Romanticism. Our focus here will be on
Herder's work in aesthetics, which fully occupied him for the first
fifteen years of his career, as well as at the very end of his
career, when he wrote a vigorous polemic against the aesthetic theory
of Kant. In this section we will consider Herder's early work in
aesthetics, while discussion of his later work will be reserved for
section 9.

Herder came from East Prussia, and from 1762 to 1764 was a student in
Königsberg, where he studied with Kant. He later turned away from
Kant, whom he saw as having himself turned away from an empirical
approach to philosophy to one that is excessively abstract and a
priori. From 1762 to 1769, he taught school in Riga, and then
left for a tour of France and Western Germany, during which he met the
young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, shortly to become famous for The
Sorrows of Young Werther. Indeed, after Herder served as preacher
in the small court of Bückeburg from 1771 to 1776, Goethe had him
appointed as the General Superintendent of Lutheran clergy in the
Duchy of Weimar, where Goethe himself was the chief minister. This
position, which Herder occupied for the rest of his life, gave him
ample time to write and put him into contact with the many other
leading figures of late eighteenth-century German literary and
intellectual life whom Goethe brought to Weimar.

Herder's first major work in aesthetics, Fragments on Recent
German Literature, appeared in 1767, when he was only
twenty-three. The first three volumes of his next work, the Groves
of Criticism (Kritische Waelder) were published in
1769. The first volume of the Groves is a spirited but
friendly critique of Lessing's Laocoön, the next two a
detailed polemic against the now forgotten Halle rhetorician Christian
Klotz (whom Lessing also attacked in a 1769 essay on “How the
Ancients Depicted Death”). The fourth volume, a polemic against
the now equally forgotten Friedrich Justus Riedel, who had published a
hodgepodge Theory of the Fine Arts and Sciences: Extracts from
various Authors in 1767, remained unpublished during Herder's
lifetime. Herder did, however, restate its most important ideas
in Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion's
Creative Dream, begun in 1770 although itself not completed and
published until 1778. Herder's work on Sculpture was
interrupted by several of what are now his best-known works,
the Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) and This
Too a Philosophy of History for the Education of Humanity
(1774). After finishing Sculpture, Herder published a
collection of folk poetry from around the world, Popular
Songs (1778–79), a work on the Old Testament, On the
Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–83), the large work on
philosophy of history already mentioned, an influential defense of
Spinoza under the name of God: Some Conversations (1787), a
work on political philosophy, the Letters for the Advancement of
Humanity (1793–97), and finally his critiques of Kant's
theoretical philosophy and aesthetics, A Metacritique on the
Critique of Pure Reason (1799) and the Kalligone or
“Birth of Beauty” (1800). In these works Kant's harsh
criticisms of his quondam student's Ideas for a Philosophy of
History of Humanity were repaid with interest.

Lessing, as we saw, had argued that visual art presents an object as
it is at a single moment and thus can only intimate an action, while
poetry describes a succession of states comprising an action and thus
can represent an object only by describing the act of producing it; he
also argued that beauty is the first law of the visual arts and thus
that a work of art must not only depict an object at a pregnant moment
in an action or event but must also depict it at a beautiful
moment. In his critique in the first of his Groves of
Criticism, Herder argues that Lessing's division of the arts was
too schematic and incomplete, offering three particular points of
criticism against Lessing. He first claims that Lessing fails to
explain why beauty must be the first law of the visual arts. He
further insists that there is an essential difference within
the so-called visual arts that Lessing fails to capture, namely that
painting is concerned strictly with with the sense of sight whereas
the aesthetics of sculpture in fact derive primarily from the sense of
touch. Herder's third critical thesis is that Lessing's emphasis on
time and succession in poetry better fits the art of music, which
Lessing ignored, while the essence of poetry lies not in such an
accidental feature of the kind of signs that it uses but in the way in
which it captures and communicates the energy of real life,
something no other art does equally well. Herder's contrast between
painting and sculpture becomes central in the argument of the fourth
of the Groves of Criticism and in the essay
on Sculpture, so let us consider the other two themes first
and then return to that one.

Herder's first charge is that Lessing fails to explain why beauty must
be the first law of the visual arts. In Herder's view, visual art must
aim at beauty because only in that way can it overcome the essential
conflict between its own spatial, static character and the incessantly
changing, transitory character of everything in nature.

In nature everything is transitory, the passion of
the soul and the sensation of the body: the activity of the soul and
the motion of the body: every state of changeable finite nature. Now
if art has only one instant in which everything is to be contained:
then every alterable state of nature is unnaturally immortalized
through it, and thus with this principle all imitation of nature
through art cease. (“First Grove,” p. 133)

Furthermore, all ordinary sensuous pleasures are
also momentary: “All sensible joys are only for the first
glance” (“First Grove,” p. 134). The only way
for an essentially static art to overcome the transitory nature of
both what it depicts and of ordinary pleasures is by picking a
beautiful moment which is as it were exempt from the actual
transitoriness of an object's history in real nature and our pleasure
in which also does not fade like other pleasures do (“First
Grove,” p. 137). In other words, our pleasure in beauty in a
sense lifts us out of the ordinary passage of time. However, Herder
quickly adds that not any kind of beauty can do this: bodily beauty
is too closely connected with time, so a truly beautiful work must
somehow instead intimate the beauty of soul rather than body:
“Corporeal beauty is not satisfying: through our eye there
looks a soul, and through the beauty that is represented to us a soul
thus also peers” (“First Grove,”
pp. 137–8).

However, this opening sally against Lessing is misleading in two
regards, first for its suggestion that the task for aesthetics is to
give a better explanation of beauty than Lessing did and second for
its suggestion that aesthetics must be grounded on a metaphysical
distinction between mind and body. The latter suggestion is misleading
because Herder does more than almost anyone else in eighteenth-century
Germany to minimize any separation between mind and body. This is a
result of his emphasis on the connection between thought and speech,
bodily sensation and expression, and the natural and man-made
environment of the linguistic community. The former suggestion is also
misleading because, while Herder will go on to argue that painting in
particular strives after beauty, he also links beauty to mere
appearance Indeed, he connects beauty with illusion. Herder also
argues that both sculpture, which he emphatically distinguishes from
painting, and poetry ultimately aim much more at truth than
at beauty. Herder's path to this conclusion is not direct, however,
and just what sense or senses of truth he has in mind is difficult to
pin down, so we will have to look at his classification of the arts in
some detail to see how to construe his theory.

In fact, Herder suggests two different classifications of the arts,
and a central challenge in the interpretation of his aesthetics is to
see how they are connected. In the first of the Groves of
Criticism, Herder argues that Lessing's distinction between the
visual arts as the representation of objects in space at a single
moment in time and poetry as the representation of a succession of
events in time confuses poetry with music. Lessing thereby misses what
is essential to poetry altogether, namely that it communicates to us
the real force of objects, including but not limited to
actions, and thus most deeply engages our own force in response. The
first part of this argument is that the contrast between the
coexistence of the properties of an object in space and the succession
of events in time properly grounds the contrast between painting and
music, not between painting and poetry, and that both painting and
music depend upon natural signs of coexistence and succession
(“First Grove,” p. 193). Both painting—which Herder
is thus far, like Lessing, using as a generic term for the visual arts
comprising both painting proper and sculpture—and music use
natural signs, that is, signs that communicate the thought of their
objects to us by means of resemblance between their own fundamental
properties and the fundamental properties of their objects. Painting
and music are thus best suited to represent objects in space and
successions of events in time. Poetry, however, uses primarily
artificial rather than natural signs, and is thus, unlike music, not
restricted to the depiction of events as Lessing thought it was
(“First Grove,” pp. 193–4). Herder turns Lessing's
distinction between natural and artificial signs against him, arguing
that precisely because poetry uses artificial rather than natural
signs its content is in no fundamental way constrained by the natural
properties of its signs themselves. Thus, in the proper hands poetry
can effectively represent anything, and in this way it
certainly has a wider sphere of truth accessible to it than
painting or music do.

But this is only the first step of Herder's argument. The second step
argues that just as Lessing's division of the arts into painting and
poetry is incomplete, the distinction between space and time on which
the former division is based is also incomplete. This is because
Lessing's distinction leaves out the essential category
of force (Kraft), and precisely this last category
is essential to the effect of poetry (“First Grove,”
p. 194). Herder is not particularly clear about the difference between
the energy (Energie) that is displayed in music and the force
(Kraft) that is at work in poetry, but his idea seems to be
that energy is the outward manifestation, in change or motion,
of underlying forces. Poetry, precisely because it employs
artificial rather than natural signs, can therefore bring us closer to
the reality that underlies the superficial features of objects
captured by artificial signs. Thus poetry may reach not only wider but
also deeper than these other arts.

In continuing his discussion of poetry in the first Grove,
Herder initially emphasizes the broader reach of poetry: precisely
because in taking in poetry we do not focus on the physical or
acoustical properties of the signs themselves, but on their meanings,
poetry can represent anything. In poetry,

it is
not the sign itself but the sense [Sinn] of the sign that
must be felt; the soul must not feel the vehicle of the force, the
words, but the force itself, the sense…But thereby it
also brings every object as it were visibly before the
soul. (“First Grove,” p. 195)

Herder then develops his view by invoking
Baumgarten's characterization of poetry as “the sensibly perfect
in discourse.” What he now argues is that poetry actually gets
its force by exploiting both the depiction of objects as in painting
and their energy as represented by music. Once painting and music have
been properly distinguished from each other and poetry from both, it
becomes clear that poetry, because it uses artificial rather than
natural signs, can present both objects and actions to us. It is in
this sense that poetry can present more truth to us than either
painting or music alone.

What remains unclear, however, is just what Herder means by
“force” here. He only hints at what he might mean a few
pages later when he says that “the essence of poetry” is
“the force, which adheres to the inner in words, the magical
force, which works on my soul through fantasy and recollection”
(“First Grove,” p. 197). The force unique to poetry seems
to be precisely its power to make us feel as if the objects and events
it describes are real and thereby to engage our own emotions and
passions more fully than the other arts can. But he may make clearer
what he has in mind in his praise for the poetry of primitive peoples
in a famous 1773 essay on what were later to be revealed to be the
fraudulent poems of the fictional Scottish bard “Ossian.”
This essay was included in a collection On German Style and
Art that also included Herder's equally famous essay on
Shakespeare (to which we will return below) and a seminal essay by
Goethe on Gothic architecture. Here Herder declaims:

Know then, that the more barbarous a people is—that is, the more
alive, the more freely acting (for that is what the word
means)—the more barbarous, that is, the more alive, the more
free, the closer to the senses, the more lyrically dynamic its songs
will be, if songs it has. The more remote a people is from an
artificial, scientific manner of thinking, speaking, and writing, the
less its songs are made for paper and print, the less its verses are
written for the dead letter. The purpose, the nature, the miraculous
power of these songs as the delight, the driving-force, the
traditional chant and everlasting joy of the people—all this
depends on the lyrical, living, dance-like quality of the song, on the
living presence of the images, and the coherence and, as it were
compulsion of the content, the feelings; on the symmetry of the words
and syllables, and sometimes even of the letters, on the flow of the
melody, and on a hundred other things which belong to the living
world, to the gnomic song of the nation, and vanish with
it. (“Ossian,” pp. 155–6)

Leave aside the fact that the poems of the supposed Ossian were
concocted in eighteenth-century Edinburgh by James MacPherson, and
were thus very much made for paper and print. Leave aside as well
Herder's supposition that the most dynamic poetry can only be composed
by a “barbarous people,” Mycenaen Greeks or Scottish
highlanders. The point remains that he connects the “living
presence of the images” achieved by the most effective poetry
with a corresponding feeling of freedom and of being
alive. Paradoxically, poetry's use of artificial rather than natural
signs, which allows it to achieve the effects of painting and music
combined, also allows it to engage our deepest emotions more
thoroughly than those other arts, including ultimately the joyous
feeling of being alive itself, even though the other arts use natural
signs and might therefore have been thought to be more effective.

We may now turn to Herder's second main criticism of Lessing, hinted
at in the first of the Groves of Criticism but more fully
developed in the unpublished fourth Grove and in its
successor, the essay on Sculpture. The fourth Grove
is cast as a critique of Riedel's Theory of the Fine Sciences and
Arts, as earlier noted, but also continues the debate with
Lessing. Herder begins with several methodological objections to
Riedel. First, although he otherwise admires Baumgarten, Herder
criticizes Riedel's acceptance of Baumgarten's characterization of
aesthetics as both a theory of beauty and “the art of thinking
beautifully,” that is, a prescription of concrete rules and
methods for artists to follow in order to produce beautiful or
otherwise successful works (“Fourth Grove,”
p. 267). Herder is clear that there are no such rules, thus that
aesthetics must confine itself to understanding the work of artists
and our experience of their work without telling them how to do that
work. Second, Herder objects to a tripartite classification of the
methods of aesthetics, as such a theory, that Riedel
proposes. According to Riedel, aesthetic theories can be divided into
those employing the methods of Aristotle, Baumgarten, or Kames: the
Aristotelian method aims to reach general principles from the analysis
of particular masterpieces of art, the method of Kames tries to reach
the same goal from the analysis of our sensations in response to
aesthetic objects, and what Riedel characterizes as the
“miserable dry” method of Baumgarten simply begins from
definitions (“Fourth Grove,” p. 262). In Herder's view,
these distinctions are artificial and the characterization of
Baumgarten's method in particular is unfair. Although the charge that
Baumgarten simply began with definitions may seem a fair critique of
his early Meditations on Poetry, Herder must have felt that
in his larger and more mature Aesthetica Baumgarten did
support his definitions by his extensive examples. In any case,
Herder's own method is certainly to reach general conclusions only
from close examination of examples of art and of our response to
them. This is why he engages Lessing in such detail, for example, and
why some of his most important claims in aesthetics are contained in
the essays on Ossian and Shakespeare. Further, Herder's approach ends
rather than begins with definitions.

The main thrust of the fourth Grove, building upon Herder's
insistence that aesthetics must employ the methods of both Aristotle
and Kames in order to reach Baumgartian conclusions, is that
recognition of the distinctions among our senses will explain the
variety of both forms of art and forms of aesthetic response. The
premise of Herder's argument is that aesthetic response is not the
disinterested reaction of a special internal sense to purely formal
properties of objects, but is really the heightened response of
various of our senses to their appropriate objects. Aesthetic
responses naturally emerge from our senses. Herder rejects the
traditional distinction between mind and body, arguing that mind is
essentially connected to the bodily organs of sense, as well as any
suggestion that aesthetic pleasures are essentially distinct from the
other sources of our happiness and unhappiness. In this connection,
Herder scorns Riedel's thesis that the beautiful is that “which
can please without an interested aim and thus also please if we do not
possess it” (“Fourth Grove,” p. 291n.), thereby
prefiguring his later critique of Kant's aesthetics. Instead, Herder
argues that the phenomenon of distance that Riedel mistakenly
characterizes as general quality of disinterestedness in all aesthetic
response is a specific feature of the visual perception of beauty,
indeed that beauty is properly speaking a property only of the
visual. This in turn leads Herder to distinguish between sight as a
sense for mere appearance and touch as the sense for reality, and thus
to the essential distinction between painting and sculpture which, he
charges, Lessing fails to make. Herder insists that visible beauty
arises only from the most superficial features of objects, not from
their full reality, and that only feeling—by which he here means
the sense of touch—can put us into direct contact with reality,
or with the deeper truth about physical reality. He expands upon this
contrast in the essay on Sculpture:

The term Schönheit [beauty] derives from the
words Schauen [to behold] and Schein
[appearance]. Beauty can most easily be understood and appreciated in
terms of Schauen, that is, through schöner Schein
[beautiful appearance]. Nothing is faster, more dazzlingly brilliant
than the light of the sun and our eyes carried upon its wing. A world
of external things ranged alongside one another is revealed in an
instant. Since this world does not disappear as do sounds, but endures
and invites contemplation, is it any wonder that our doctrine
of psychology chooses to borrow many of its terms from this sense?
For psychology, to know is to see, and its greatest pleasure
is beauty…. If we succeeded in “deriving”
from this sense alone a true phenomenology of
the beautiful and the true, we should already have
achieved a great deal.

Nonetheless, we would not thereby have achieved everything and
certainly not what is most fundamental, simple, and
primary…. The living, embodied truth of the three-dimensional
space of angles, of form and volume, is not something we can learn
through sight. This is all the more true of the essence of
sculpture, beautiful form and beautiful shape, for
this is not a matter of color, or of the play of proportion and
symmetry, or of light and shadow, but of physically present,
tangible truth…. Consider the lover of art sunk deep in
contemplation who circles restlessly around a sculpture. What would he
not do to transform his sight into touch, to make his seeing
into a form of touching that feels in the dark…. With
his soul he seeks to grasp the image that arouse from the arm
and the soul of the artist. Now he has it! The illusion has worked;
the sculpture lives and his soul feels that it lives. His
soul speaks to it, not as if his soul sees, but as if it touches, as
if it feels. (Sculpture, pp. 39–41)

Herder's emphasis on the sense of touch and its centrality to the
experience of sculpture builds upon his interpretation of the great
eighteenth-century debate about the relation between sight and touch
in which Locke, Berkeley, and Diderot had all argued that we do not
correlate the deliverances of the two senses innately, but have to
learn from experience that an object that looks a certain way also
feels a certain way, or vice versa (see Sculpture, pp.
33–8). But he takes this thesis a step further by arguing that
it is touch that reveals the true form of objects, while sight merely
reveals or plays with their superficial appearance. Thus, although
sight initially seemed to be the paradigmatic vehicle of knowledge,
Herder ultimately concludes that “in painting there is merely
beautiful deception” while in sculpture there is “primary
truth” (“Fourth Grove,” p. 314). The passages
from Sculpture also display what Herder thinks is the
significance of the perception of the true form of objects through the
tactile medium of sculpture: it communicates to us the feeling of life
in the sculpture and in turn arouses our own feeling of being truly
alive. In the case of sculpture, both the artist and the audience can
fully feel the emotions and passions of life that made Pygmalion wish
that his beautiful creation could come alive. This view of the power
of art is what Herder finds missing in Riedel and perhaps even in
Lessing himself.

In the fourth Grove, Herder also has interesting things to
say about arts we have not mentioned, namely, dance, architecture, and
horticulture, and an important passage about music, which he analyzes
as the “imitation of human passions,” arousing “a
series of inner feelings, true, although not distinct, not intuitive,
only extremely obscure” (“Fourth Grove,” pp.
406–7). But we will have to leave these arts aside and conclude
our discussion of Herder with a comment on his supposed historical and
cultural relativism, which, as was earlier noted, has often been
thought to be his central contribution to modern thought. Herder's
writings are certainly replete with observations connecting the
different circumstances and mores of different cultures and times with
differences in their arts and tastes. For example: “The Greek,
the Gothic, the Moorish taste in architecture and sculpture, in
mythology and in poetry, is it the same? And is [the difference] not
to be explained from times, mores, and peoples?” (“Fourth
Grove,” p. 286). And in his essay on Shakespeare, he attacks the
rigid insistence on unity of time, place, and action in classical
French theater by arguing that these ideals grew naturally out of the
circumstances of both Greek theater and Greek life, but that it is
absurd to make them into rigid rules in the very different
circumstances of both modern theater and modern life
(“Shakespeare,” pp. 162–3).

However, it would be a mistake to infer from such comments that Herder
does not think that there are underlying commonalities in the arts and
tastes of different times and places, or that people living in one
time and culture cannot learn to appreciate deeply the art of another
time and culture. On the contrary, the argument of the essay on
Shakespeare is that the best art of different times and
places—for example, the theater of Sophocles and that of
Shakespeare—must differ superficially precisely because
at the deepest level they are committed to the same
principle—the truthful imitation of nature—but
have different natures to imitate. Thus he writes that the
unities of time, place, and action were not artificial for the Greeks
at all, although it would be for moderns (“Shakespeare,”
p. 163). Further, it is precisely because the Greek “view of the
world, their customs, the state of the republics, the tradition of the
heroic age, religion, even music, expression, and the degrees of
illusion changed” (“Shakespeare,” p. 164), that
Shakespeare's drama was bound to be different than Sophocles'. It was
bound to be different because while all these things changed,
Shakespeare was committed to the same underlying principle of
truthfully representing his own world that his drama, unlike that of
the misguided French classicists, had to look and sound
different. If Shakespeare's “world did not offer such simplicity
of history, traditions, domestic, political, and religious conditions,
then of course it will not display it” in his work either.
Instead, he will create his “drama out of [his world's] own
history, the spirit of its age, customs, views, language, national
attitudes, traditions, and pastimes” (“Shakespeare,”
p. 167). But in doing so, Shakespeare was in fact doing the same thing
as Sophocles:

For Shakespeare is Sophocles's brother, precisely
where he seems to be so dissimilar, and inwardly he is wholly like
him. His whole dramatic illusion is attained by means of this
authenticity, truth, and historical
creativity. (“Shakespeare,” p. 172)

Precisely because the art of Sophocles and the
art of Shakespeare rest on the same underlying principle it is
possible for people at any time to come to appreciate them both,
although no doubt with the considerable effort it would take to
appreciate fully their language, their customs, in short, their
worlds.

Herder is thus no straightforward historicist or cultural
relativist. Rather, his convictions that the best art reveals the
truth about its world and that there are deep commonalities in human
emotional responses to such truths allow him to defend the ideal of a
standard of or paradigm for taste after all. It will be noted,
however, that throughout Herder's aesthetics the notion of play has
hardly figured at all; it has been mentioned only in connection with
the superficial art of painting rather than with the deeper arts of
sculpture, poetry, and even music. For an attempt to combine an
aesthetics of truth with an aesthetics of play that is in some ways
shallower than Herder's thought but in other ways an important
innovation in German aesthetics, let us now take a look at the work
of Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779). He was born a
quarter-century before Herder but his encyclopedic General Theory
of the Fine Arts, first published from 1771 to 1774, was
contemporaneous with such central works of Herder as the essays on
Ossian and Shakespeare. Sulzer advocates a conventional view of the
relation between aesthetic experience and truth: the experience of
art—although not solely of beautiful art—can make moral
truths vivid and efficacious for us, even though we can know those
truths independently of art, and indeed must know the most
fundamental principles of morality independently of art. But he also
emphasized that aesthetic experience is an intrinsically enjoyable
and therefore valuable experience of the unhindered activity
of the mind. His conception of the mind has Leibnizian origins, but
his emphasis on the pleasure of its unhindered activity points the
way toward Kant's conception of aesthetic experience as the free play
of the cognitive powers. While Sulzer was generally a more
conventional thinker than Herder, he here introduces a theme that is
almost entirely absent from Herder's thought and prepares the way for
Kant's synthesis of two although not all three of the main approaches
of eighteenth-century aesthetics.

Sulzer was born in Winthertur, Switzerland, in 1720. Destined for the
clergy, at sixteen he was boarded with a pastor in Zürich and attended
the gymnasium there. But at eighteen, he became more interested in the
study of mathematics, botany, and philosophy, and came under the
influence of Bodmer and Breitinger. Sulzer was ordained on the
completion of his studies in 1739, and in 1740 became a tutor in a
wealthy Zürich household. The next year he became a village vicar and
was able to devote himself to natural history and archaeology. In 1744
he took up a teaching position in Magdeburg, Germany, and in 1747 he
became professor of mathematics at a gymnasium in Berlin. As early as
1745 he published a Short Concept of all the sciences and other
Parts of Learning (Kurzer Begriff aller Wissenschaften und
anderen Theile der Gelehrsamkeit, worin jeder nach seinem Inhalt,
Nutzen und Vollkommenheit kürzlich beschrieben wird), which went
through six German editions and was translated into Latin in
1790. Sulzer was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1750. From that
time on he regularly published philosophical work in the proceedings
of the Academy, including essays on reason, consciousness, language,
materialism, the immortality of the soul, and the nature and existence
of God, as well as a lengthy “Investigation of the original of
agreeable and disagreeable sentiments” (1751), which first
stated central themes of his aesthetics. He also published shorter
treatments of such topics as genius (1757), the utility of drama, a
reply to Rousseau's attack upon the theater (1760), and “Energy
in works of fine art” (1765). In 1755 Sulzer published a
translation of Hume's first Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding, and Hume's theories of the imagination and the
moral sentiments, although not his skepticism, would considerably
influence the further development of Sulzer's own philosophy.
Although Sulzer himself remained at bottom a loyal Leibnizo-Wolffian,
his introduction of Hume into German philosophical discourse prepared
the way for Kant's critique of that philosophy. In 1761, Sulzer began
work on his General Theory of the Fine Arts, which was
originally planned as a revision of Jacques Lacombe's Dictionnaire
portraitif des beaux-arts (1752) but became a vehicle for the
statement of Sulzer's own general views about aesthetics and the moral
significance of art as well an outlet for his vast learning and
energy. Sulzer finally published the General Theory in two
volumes from 1771 to 1774; especially in the expanded posthumous
editions by Friedrich von Blankenburg in 1786–87 and
1792–94 (Sulzer having died in 1779), this remains the most
valuable source for the aesthetics of the German Enlightenment and its
bibliography.

Sulzer's earliest works in aesthetics concerned nature rather than
art, but already demonstrated his lifelong concern for the moral
significance of aesthetic experience. In his Conversations on the
Beauties of Nature (Unterredungen über die Schönheiten der
Natur, 1750), which was republished in 1770 together with his
earlier Moral Thoughts on the Works of Nature (Versuch
einiger moralischen Gedanken über die Werke der Natur, 1745),
Sulzer analyzed the benefits of the enjoyment of natural beauty in a
way that prefigured his subsequent complex analysis of the value of
art. In the first conversation he argued that the contemplation of
natural beauty has a calming and moderating influence on our
passions. The remaining conversations argue that the contemplation of
the order of nature proves to us that its existence cannot have been a
matter of chance, and that its beauty gives us palpable evidence of
the wisdom and benevolence of its creator. This analysis foreshadows
Sulzer's later position that the enjoyment of art is of immediate
moral value because it directly contributes to our happiness, which is
the ultimate object of morality, and is also of indirect moral value
because it can enliven and thereby make more effective our knowledge
of the general precepts of morality, and is indeed the best instrument
for that end.

Sulzer's mature aesthetics is firmly grounded in his generally
Leibnizo-Wolffian metaphysics and psychology as well as in his
Wolffian moral philosophy. The central tenets of his metaphysics and
psychology are that the human mind is essentially representational, so
that desire and will as well as cognition are forms of representation,
and that the ultimate source of all of our pleasurable sentiments is
the unhindered activity of our capacity for representation.
Conversely, the fundamental source of disagreeable sentiments is the
restriction of our representational activity. Sulzer's morality is a
Wolffian form of utilitarianism, according to which the goal of the
moral life is happiness. Thus, whatever contributes to happiness is at
least prima facie good. Aesthetic experience is a variety of
free and unhindered activity of our representational capacity, and
therefore produces pleasurable sentiments which are a primary
constituent of happiness. In that way, aesthetic experience is of
direct moral value. But works of art also enliven our abstract
knowledge of moral precepts and make them effective on our action, so
aesthetic experience is also of indirect moral value. Sulzer's
morality might seem egocentric, but he forestalls such an objection by
an argument that normal human beings naturally desire for others what
they desire for themselves, and naturally recognize the right of
others to that for which they claim a right for themselves
(“Psychological Considerations,” p. 287). Thus those who
desire happiness for themselves naturally desire it for others as
well, and those who desire happiness in the form of the pleasure of
aesthetic experience for themselves will naturally desire it for
others as well. However, Sulzer also recognizes that art can be put to
perverse and immoral use as well as healthy and good use, thus while
art can contribute to morality both directly and indirectly we must
also have an independent grasp of and commitment to the fundamental
principles of morality in order to make sure that aesthetic
experience's natural tendency to morally good outcomes is not
perverted.

Working within the tradition of Wolff and Baumgarten, Sulzer bases his
aesthetics on the premise that the experience of beauty is founded on
the sensuous perception of perfection. Perfection consists in the rich
variety of a manifold on the one hand and its unity on the other but
also in a third element, namely the “complete agreement”
of what a thing is “with what it ought to be, or of the real
with the ideal” (“Vollkommenheit”
(“Perfection”) in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen
Künste, volume IV, pp. 688–9, at p. 688). He thus allows
for no conception of perfection without a concept of purpose. Kant
will subsequently reject the assumption that we must have a conception
of the purpose of an object in order to make a (pure) judgment of
beauty about it. But Sulzer himself already departs from the purely
Wolffian conception that the experience of beauty consists simply in a
clear but obscure recognition of the perfection of an object relative
to a conception of its purpose because he holds that the experience of
the beauty of an object is an awareness of its effect on our
representational faculty rather than an awareness of
the cause of that effect in the object. Thus the experience
of beauty becomes the sensation or sentiment (Empfindung)
caused by the perfection of the object, rather than a clear but
indistinct cognition of that perfection. The real object of pleasure
then becomes the activity of one's own representational state,
manifested in the form of sentiment, that is caused by the perfection
of the beautiful object. This is Sulzer's decisive modification of the
Leibnizo-Wolffian approach to aesthetics, not to be found in
Baumgarten nor in Baumgarten's admirer Herder. However, from this
innovation Sulzer does not draw the conclusion that Kant subsequently
will, namely, that there can be no general rules for beauty. On the
contrary, in his view the causal relation between perfection in the
object and the pleasurable sentiments of activity in the subject is
precisely the sort of relation that gives rise to rules, although such
rules will be fairly general rather than very specific.

In holding that the real source of our pleasure in beautiful objects
is our sensation of our own representational activity Sulzer is led
to identify aesthetically valuable forms of sentiment that are not
caused by beauty at all. In fact, he argues that the fine arts must
arouse the full range of human sentiments, even sentiments of
ugliness (although, unlike Lessing, he does not distinguish among the
fine arts in this regard) (“Häßlich”
(“Ugly”), Allgemeine Theorie, volume II,
pp. 457–9). But even before he reaches that conclusion, his
theory of beauty makes the nature and aims of art more complex than
they might initially seem. Sulzer employs a trifold division of
things that please us that is not dissimilar to Kant's subsequent
distinction between the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful. He
distinguishes between things that please us “even if we do not
have the least conception of the constitution” or means by
which they do that, things that please us only if we have “a
distinct representation of their constitution,” and things that
please us because “the constitution of the objects charms our
attention,” but where we “sense a satisfaction in them
before we cognize them distinctly, before we know what they ought to
be.” The last of these is what comprise the “class of the
beautiful properly speaking,” while the former obviously
correspond to Kant's classes of the agreeable and the good
respectively (“Schön”
(“Beautiful”), Allgemeine Theorie, volume IV,
pp. 305–19, at p. 306). Then Sulzer makes a further
distinction. Because of his inclusion of purposiveness in his
conception of perfection, he argues that the perfect can please us
“either because of its material, or because of its external
form, or through its inner constitution, by means of which it is an
instrument or means for the achievement of some final end”
(ibid., p. 307). Correspondingly, there is a distinction between the
pleasure that we may take in superficial beauty of the form and
matter of an object, and the deeper pleasure that we take when an
object also has “inner worth.” “A higher species of
beauty arises from the close unification of the perfect, the
beautiful, and the good. This arouses not merely satisfaction, but
true inner pleasure, which often empowers the entire soul, and the
enjoyment of which is happiness” (ibid., pp. 309–10). On
Sulzer's account, a beauty that appeals to the full range of our
cognitive and emotional capacities through its purposiveness as well
as its form is a “higher species” of beauty than one that
appeals to our sense of form alone.

Sulzer's conception of the two levels of beauty also leads him to an
account of the “ideal of beauty” that may have been a
source for Kant's later discussion of that concept, which will in turn
be criticized by Friedrich Schiller (see section 8). According to
Sulzer,

that the human form [Gestalt] is the most
beautiful of all visible objects does not need to be proved…The
strongest, the most noble, and the most blessed sentiments of which
the human mind is capable are effects of this
beauty. (“Schönheit”
(“Beauty”), Allgemeine Theorie, volume IV,
pp. 319–27, at pp. 319–20)

The “external form of the inner character
of a human being” (ibid., p. 322) is the ideal of beauty, when
the beauty of that external form expresses the goodness of the
internal character; correspondingly, the external expression of inner
evil is the most hateful form of appearance. Like Herder, Sulzer
recognizes that the variety of human tastes in both form and more
substantial matters of morality means that different individuals and
peoples will find both different external forms beautiful and
different characters good, thus leading to differences in their ideals
of beauty. But he is confident of the general principle that
“every human being holds that to be most beautiful whose form
announces to the eye of the judge the most perfect and best human
being” (ibid., p. 320). This illustrates his general conception
of the force of rules of taste: they express underlying commonalities
in the etiology of human preferences without entailing complete
agreement about particulars.

Sulzer also develops a complex theory of the value of fine art. Fine
art aims to produce pleasure both by setting our cognitive powers into
activity through the formal and material beauties of its products and
by arousing our deepest feelings. Since the aim of morality is human
happiness, art has immediate moral value just because it sets our
mental powers into enjoyable activity. But its ability to arouse our
emotions also gives art indirect moral value through its capacity to
enliven and make effective our otherwise abstract and not always
efficacious acknowledgement of the general precepts of morality. Thus,
in such a statement as that “the essence” of art

consists in the fact that it impresses the objects
of our representation with sensible force, its end is the lively
affection [Rührung] of our minds, and in its application it
aims at the elevation of the spirit and the heart, (“Künste;
Schöne Künste” (“Arts; Fine Arts”) Allgemeine
Theorie, volume III, pp. 72–95, at p. 75),

Sulzer clearly indicates that art has immediate
value in its vivification of our sensory and cognitive powers as well
as the value of its power to elevate our spirit and heart and thereby
make morality efficacious for us. To be sure, he often emphasizes the
latter aspect of the value of art more than the former; for example,
he writes

The fine arts also use their charms in order to
draw our attention to the good and to affect us with love for it. Only
through this application does it become important to the human race
and deserve the attention of the wise and the support of
regents. (ibid., p. 76)

In a time and place where Calvinism and Pietism
still questioned the value of the fine arts, it may have been
necessary for him to emphasize the value of art for enlivening our
moral precepts over his theory that morality itself aims at a kind of
happiness in which the pleasures of the fine arts play a direct and
major rôle. But the latter is as much a part of his thought as the
former.

Sulzer's more conventional view that the fine arts serve morality by
enlivening our moral feelings explains his recognition of the value of
the ugly as well as the beautiful in art: our sentiments of ugliness
need to be aroused in order to strengthen our aversion to the evil
just as our sentiments of beauty need to be aroused in order to
strengthen our attraction to the good. But Sulzer also recognizes that
the emotional power of art means that it can be made into a tool for
evil as well as for good, especially in the political arena. For
example, a leader

who does not have sufficiently secure power in his
hands turns to the efforts of his artists in order to clothe his
tyranny with agreeableness; and by this means the attention of that
part of the populace which is merely passive is turned away from
freedom and directed toward mere entertainment. (“Künste; Schöne
Künste,” Allgemeine Theorie, volume III, p. 83)

For this reason, the moral potential of art must
be governed by a firm recognition of the fundamental principles of
morality itself (ibid., p. 78). Sulzer does not make the mistake of
thinking that the experience of fine art, valuable as it can be for
sound morality and politics, can substitute for a direct grasp of
sound principles of morality and politics. Although his emphasis on
the moral potential of the heightened sensitivity
(Empfindlichkeit) that can be developed through aesthetic
education may have been an important source for Schiller, he would
not have gone as far as the latter does in his Letters on
Aesthetic Education in suggesting that aesthetic education is
both a necessary and sufficient condition for moral regeneration.

Sulzer was clearly significant for successors such as Kant and
Schiller, both for his emphasis on the free activity of the mind in
aesthetic experience and for his complex rather than simplistic
position on the relation between art and morality. One other
important aesthetician of the 1770s was also, like Herder, actually a
student of Kant, but his theory would become an unstated target of
Kant's criticism rather than a source for him. This is Marcus Herz
(1747–1803), Herder's junior by three years. Remembered by
philosophers primarily as the respondent at the defense of Kant's
inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible
and Intelligible World in 1770 and as the recipient of Kant's
letters describing his progress on the Critique of Pure
Reason in the following decade, Herz had a significant career of
his own, as a physician and medical writer, as a lecturer on
philosophy, and as the author not only of the earliest exposition of
Kant's philosophy, but also of an independent and important work in
aesthetics.

Herz was born to a Jewish scribe and his wife in Berlin in 1747, and
received a traditional talmudic education. At the age of fifteen he
was sent to apprentice with a Jewish merchant in Königsberg, but at
nineteen he matriculated at the university in Königsberg (two years
after Herder had left) as a medical student—the only university
course open to Jews in Prussia. Medical students were required to
study modern languages, philosophy, and mathematics, and Herz became a
loyal student of Kant's, attending his lectures on logic, metaphysics,
moral philosophy, natural law, physics, and physical geography. Kant's
selection of the Jewish student for the defense of his inaugural
dissertation in 1770 was not accepted happily by some members of the
faculty, but Kant supported Herz then and always remained loyal to
him, even as the student's views diverged from his own. Shortly after
the defense of Kant's dissertation, Herz left Königsberg without a
degree but with an introduction from Kant to Moses Mendelssohn. He
immediately became a member of Mendelssohn's circle, and also resumed
his medical studies in Berlin, and then from 1772 to 1774 in Halle,
where he received his doctorate. He then returned to Berlin, where he
was appointed to the Jewish hospital. He attended Mendelssohn in his
final illness in 1786. Most of Herz's publications arose from his
medical and scientific practice, and included his Letters to
Doctors in 1777 and 1784; Outline of All Medical
Sciences in 1782, which was adopted as a textbook in Halle; a
companion to his Berlin lectures on Experimental Physics;
an Essay on Dizziness in 1786; and a controversial
essay On Early Burial among the Jews in 1787, in which he
argued against the current practice among Jews of burial on the day of
death on medical grounds, holding that death could not always be
conclusively determined within such a short period. In 1782, Herz also
provided the German translation of Manasseh ben
Israel's Vindication of the Jews, to which Mendelssohn
provided the preface that would in turn lead the way to
his Jerusalem of the next year; Herz thus played a role in
the genesis of that central text. In 1777 he began offering private
lectures on philosophy in addition to his medical practice, which were
well attended. Herz died of lung disease on January 19, 1803.

Herz's two important philosophical works were his Considerations
from Speculative Philosophy (Betrachtungen aus der
spekulativen Weltweisheit) of 1771 and his Essay on Taste and
the Causes of its Variety (Versuch über den Geschmack und die
Ursachen seiner Verschiedenheit), first published in 1776 and
then in an expanded edition in 1790—the same year as
Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. The contrast
between the two works in aesthetics is interesting, because while some
arguments in Kant's work can be construed as subtle criticisms of some
of Herz's positions, Herz finished even the second edition of his book
without any knowledge of Kant's criticisms. In general, he remained
closer to the Wolffian and Baumgartian theory of beauty and taste that
had been transmitted to him through Mendelssohn than to the position
of his erstwhile teacher Kant, but he also shared Sulzer's emphasis on
mental activity and Herder's emphasis on the social dimension of art
while introducing some novel positions of his own.

Herz's Considerations from Speculative Philosophy, published
at the age of twenty-four, does not purport to be more than a German
paraphrase of Kant's Latin dissertation, but it goes beyond Kant's
published work on a number of points in the treatment of space, time,
and things in themselves. It also adds a Mendelssohnian argument about
the simplicity of the soul, and, most surprisingly, includes a
digression on aesthetic judgment that anticipates a central argument
of his subsequent Essay on Taste. The central arguments of
this digression, which comes in Herz's exposition of Kant's new theory
of space and time as the forms of sensibility, are first, that beauty
is an objective property especially connected to the form of an
object, and not a mere sensation or sentiment (Empfindung) in
the subject, and second, that there are general principles of
beautiful form. However, form must always be realized in matter, and
individuals differ more in their response to matter than to form, so
these general principles are objective but not completely determinate,
thus allowing for differences of taste even though beauty is
objective. Kant would subsequently agree that individuals differ in
their response to matter but not to form, but then restrict pure
judgments of taste to form alone, thus attempting to guarantee
unanimity of judgments of taste instead of accepting variation as Herz
did. Kant's analysis of pure judgments of taste might thus be seen as
a criticism of Herz's theory.

Five years after the Considerations, Herz developed this
conception of beauty as objective but yielding only indeterminate
rules for taste into the far more extensive Essay on Taste.
Herz begins with what he considers to be a Baumgartian definition of
beauty as the appearance of perfection in an object, where perfection
in turn consists in the unity of a manifold. However, he adds that a
work of art also has a Haltung, or expresses an attitude, and
that its beauty also depends upon the harmony between the attitude
expressed in the work and the goal or purpose of the work. We do not
attribute purposes to natural objects, he argues, so in their case
beauty lies in manifoldness and unity alone, but in human productions
and therefore in art we always expect and respond to a purpose. Here
Herz's analysis anticipates Kant's differentiation between natural and
artistic beauty. He next argues that as natural beauty consists only
in manifoldness and unity, we respond to it with the play of our
imagination, which apprehends manifoldness, and reason, which
recognizes unity. But as artistic beauty consists in the objective
factors of manifoldness, unity, and attitude, the response to artistic
beauty depends upon imagination, reason, and the further element of
feeling, for response to the attitude of the work. In this analysis,
Herz stresses that the perception of beauty is not passive, but rather
active, because of the rôle of both imagination and reason. He also
argues that our pleasure in beauty is ultimately due to the activity
of our mental powers in its perception, activity being the greatest
source of our pleasure. Here Herz clearly aligns himself with
Sulzer. Herz then argues that human beings share their basic
capacities of imagination, reason, and feeling, but that there are
numerous factors that affect how these general faculties function
concretely in different individuals and populations. This explains
differences of taste without undermining the metaphysical objectivity
of beauty: these differences include variations in freedom of thought,
religion, morality, material wealth, climate and regime. Here Herz's
thought parallels the contemporary thought of Herder.

Some of Herz's most interesting points and his greatest differences
with Kant's theory of taste emerge in the discussion of the influence
of morality on taste. Herz argues that the enjoyment of beauty
contributes to morality in two ways, directly and indirectly. The
enjoyment of beauty contributes to morality directly because as a
source of mental activity it is a source of happiness, and happiness
is nothing less than the aim of morality. Here again Herz adopts the
same positions as Sulzer. Herz takes a different position than Sulzer
on the indirect moral benefits of art, however, arguing not that the
experience of art enlivens moral sentiments that we already have from
our more abstract recognition of general moral precepts, but rather
that the cultivation of taste, which happens only in society,
contributes to morality indirectly because it generates feelings of
sociability that can then support our attempts to be moral. Although
Kant will not mention Herz's name in the Critique of the Power of
Judgment, this seems to be the kind of vindication of aesthetic
experience that Kant criticizes under the name of an “empirical
interest in the beautiful,” holding that morality requires
an a priori principle rather than mere feelings of
sociability and can therefore be supported only by an
“intellectual interest in the beautiful.”

Finally, in the appendix to the Essay Herz also argues
against the position of Du Bos that critics have no better rules for
arguing about the merits of works of art than cooks do for arguing
about ragouts, a position adopted from Du Bos by Hume and subsequently
endorsed by Kant. In spite of his recognition of the many factors that
create variability in judgments of taste, Herz thus insisted to the
end that we can have not just an a priori ideal of agreement
in taste but rational means for arguing about judgments of taste,
consisting in discussion of unity amidst variety on the one hand and
the identification of factors leading to disagreement on the other
hand. In this regard, Herz remained within the ambit of Wolff,
Baumgarten, and Meier rather than approaching the view of his
contemporary Herder. One might nevertheless have expected his emphasis
on the rôle of individual mental activity in aesthetic experience,
rather than Herder's emphasis on truth as the basis of aesthetic
experience, to have led to the more radical position on the
possibility of determinate rules for art criticism.

Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793) is the last of the pre-Kantian
German aestheticians who will be considered here. Moritz was another
of the many German intellectuals of the eighteenth century who rose to
renown from unpromising beginnings. He was the son of an army musician
who sought refuge from his own circumstances in Quietism, an extreme
sect of Pietism, and inflicted its religiosity upon his son. After
several years as an apprentice to a hatmaker, Moritz was able to
attend grammar school for a few years. He spent a few years at the
universities in Erfurt and Wittenberg, interspersed with attempts to
become an actor and a stay at the seminary of the Moravian Brothers,
another Pietist sect. At twenty-two, he became a schoolteacher in
Berlin. In 1782 he made a trip to England and published a travelogue
which won him some recognition, after which he returned to his school
until 1786, when his publisher financed a trip to Italy in the hope of
getting another popular travelogue out of him. In Italy Moritz became
a friend of Goethe, who would write a much more famous account of his
Italian journey, and learned enough about classical art to become
professor of aesthetics at the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1789, the
position he held until his death just four years later. Moritz's
publications during his brief but intense literary career included, in
addition to his Italian travelogue, eventually published in
1792–3, the novels Anton Reiser (1786–90), a
barely fictionalized autobiography, and Andreas Hartknopf: An
Allegory; philological works including an Essay on German
Prosody in 1786 and Lectures on Style in 1793; textbooks
on grammar and logic for children, a German Grammar for the
Ladies, English and Italian grammars for Germans, and an
eventually very successful account of Greek mythology aimed at both
children and adults; a Theory of Ornament; and a journal of
“empirical psychology” (erfahrende Seelenkunde)
that he edited for ten years. But what concern us here are the essays
in aesthetics that Moritz published between 1785 and 1791.

These essays commence with the ambitiously entitled “Attempt at
a Unification of all the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept
of that which is complete in itself,” dedicated to
Moses Mendelssohn and published in 1785 in an issue of
the Berlinische Monatsschrift that also contained an article
(on astronomy) by Kant. In these essays Moritz argues that works of
art please us because they have an “internal
purposiveness” independent of any purpose external to them, a
conception that is thought to have anticipated Kant's own account of
beauty as “purposiveness without a purpose” and the
nineteenth-century conception of “art for art's sake.” It
is certainly not unreasonable to assume that Kant read Moritz's essay,
appearing as it did alongside one of his own, but Kant's notion of
“subjective” or “formal” purposiveness is
probably a repudiation of Moritz's conception of “internal
purposiveness” rather than a successor to it. Moritz's view is
also distinct from later conceptions of “art for art's
sake.” In fact, as the brief “Outlines of a Complete
Theory of the Fine Arts” that he published in the journal of the
Academy of Arts in 1789 makes clear, Moritz rejected the
“subjectivist” view that our pleasure in artistic or
natural beauty is due primarily to the way in which it freely engages
our own mental powers on which the theory of Kant and later advocates
of “art for art's sake” is based in favor of an
“objectivist” view:

The genuinely beautiful is not merely in us and in
our manner of representation, but is to be found outside us
in the objects themselves. (“Grundlinien zu einer vollständigen
Theorie der schönen Künste,” in Werke, volume II, pp.
591–2, at p. 591)

What Moritz actually held is that the
“internal purposiveness” of a work of art is an
intimation of the perfection of the world as a whole, and that we
enjoy it precisely as such an intimation. Thus Moritz attempted to
stem the growth of the theory of aesthetic experience as free play by
reverting to a theory of beauty as an intimation of the true order of
the cosmos that has its roots in the views of Wolff and
Shaftesbury.

Both the essay on art as “that which is complete in
itself” and a longer pamphlet “On the formative Imitation
of the Beautiful” (Über die bildende Nachahmung des
Schönen) that Moritz published in 1788 start off with a contrast
between the beautiful on the one side and the useful and the good on
the other in a way that does anticipate the opening stratagem of
Kant's “Analytic of the Beautiful” in his Critique of
the Power of Judgment in 1790. Moritz analyses the useful in
particular as a means to a perfection that lies outside of the useful
object itself, namely,

the convenience or comfortableness that accrues to
myself or another through the use of it…i.e., I consider it
merely as a means, for which I myself, in so far as my perfection is
thereby promoted, am the end. The merely useful object is thus in
itself nothing whole or complete.

Then he immediately assumes, as if this were the
only alternative, that

In the contemplation of the beautiful I roll the
end from myself back into the object itself: I consider it, as
something that is complete not in me but rather in
itself, that thus comprises a whole in itself, and that affords
me pleasure on its own account. (“Über den Begriff
des in sich selbst Vollendeten,” Werke, volume
II, pp. 543–8, at p. 543)

Moritz continues that a beautiful object does not
please us, like a clock or a knife, because it satisfies some need of
our own, not even the need to be pleased, but, remarkably, that

the beautiful needs us, in order to be
cognized. We could subsist very well without the contemplations of
beautiful works of art, but these, as such, cannot well subsist
without our contemplation.

He then goes on to say that when we see a play
put on before an empty theater, we are displeased, not for the sake of
the author or actors, but for the sake of the play itself, as work of
art whose need to be contemplated is going unfulfilled (ibid.,
p. 544)!

In a passage that points more toward Arthur Schopenhauer than to Kant,
Moritz next writes:

The sweet astonishment, the agreeable forgetting of ourself
in the contemplation of a beautiful work of art, is also a proof that
our gratification here is something subordinate, that we voluntarily
allow ourself to be determined through the beautiful, to which we for
a while concede a sort of sovereignty over all our own feelings.
While the beautiful draws our consideration entirely to itself, it
draws us for a while away from our self, it is the highest degree of
pure and unselfish gratification that the beautiful affords us. In
the moment we sacrifice our individual, limited existence to a sort of
higher existence. The gratification in the beautiful must thereby ever
more approach that of unselfish love if it is to be
genuine…. The beautiful in the work of art is not for me pure
and unmixed until I completely think away its special relation to me
and consider it is as something that has been brought forth entirely
for its own sake, so that it could be something complete in itself.
(Ibid., p. 545)

As the popularity of Schopenhauer's subsequent presentation of this
view demonstrates, Moritz has surely here captured an aspect of the
experience of artistic—or for that matter natural—beauty
that many people have felt. But so far his conception of and argument
for the idea of the beautiful as that which is perfect and complete in
itself has been entirely negative; what is it in a beautiful object
that can so please us and yet distract us completely from our ordinary
concern with ourselves and our own pleasures?

The answer to this question can be found in Moritz's longer
essay On the formative Imitation of the Beautiful. Here,
after a more extended contrast between the beautiful, the useful, and
the good, Moritz adds to his previous account that a beautiful object
is something that seems to us to be “a whole subsisting for
itself” insofar as it “strikes our senses or can
be grasped by our imagination,” and that “to that
extent our instruments of sensation prescribe
its measure to the beautiful” (Über die bildende
Nachahmung des Schönen, Werke, volume II, pp.
551–78, at pp. 558–9). Here he aligns himself with the
tradition of Wolff and Baumgarten by asserting that the perception of
beauty is a perception of perfection by means of the senses or their
extension through imagination. But he still owes us an explanation of
what the internal and objective perfection of the beautiful object is.
This comes next, when he states that it is actually the
“interconnection of the whole of nature” insofar as we
grasp it by means of the senses and imagination that we contemplate
and admire in a beautiful work of art, or that it is intimated to us
by such a work. “Every beautiful whole from the hand of the
formative artist is thus a little impression of the highest beauty in
the great whole of nature” (ibid., p. 560; see also
“Grundlinien,” p. 592). The beautiful intimates the true
order of the world-whole to us in a way that the use of our ordinary
powers of thought, imagination, and sense on particular pieces of the
world-whole cannot do. Only in the experience of the
beautiful can we actually get a sense of the order of the
world-whole.

From the premise that “The nature of the beautiful consists
precisely in the fact that its inner essence lies outside of the
limits of the power of thought, in its origination, in its own
coming-to-be,” Moritz infers that “in the case of the
beautiful, the power of thought can no longer ask, why is it
beautiful?” (ibid., p. 564). The essence of beauty thus escapes
ordinary conceptual thought. This is the basis for Moritz's argument,
in another essay entitled “The Signature of the
Beautiful,” that the beautiful cannot be described, that is,
that although words themselves may be beautiful, they cannot
provide a description of beauty—even such a brilliant
description as Winckelmann's description of the Apollo Belvedere
“rips apart the wholeness of this work of art,” and
“is more damaging than useful to the contemplation of this
sublime work of art” (“Die Signatur des
Schönen,” Werke, volume II, pp. 579–88, at p.
588). And for this reason, the artistic genius cannot be fully
conscious of what he does when he creates a beautiful work of art, for
its beauty cannot be reduced to any concept that he can state (ibid.,
p. 585). Here Moritz arrives at results that are superficially similar
to those Kant will arrive at a few years later—that aesthetic
judgments cannot be grounded in determinate concept and that the
process of creation by artistic genius cannot be guided and explained
by determinate concepts. But he reaches these conclusions for very
different reasons: Kant will draw these conclusions from his
subjectivist account of the origin of aesthetic pleasure in a play of
the cognitive powers that is free rather than determined by concepts,
while Moritz draws these conclusions from his conception that a
beautiful object always intimates the order of the world-whole that is
beyond our grasp through any of the ordinary powers of mind. In other
words, Moritz draws his conclusions from his version of an aesthetics
of truth, while Kant will draw similar conclusions from an aesthetics
based on the idea of the free play of mental powers.

In 1791, Moritz dedicated a review of the Essay on Taste by
“our mutual friend” Herz to Salomon Maimon, another
extraordinary Jewish intellectual who had arisen to prominence in
Berlin from beginnings even more unpromising than those of Mendelssohn
and Herz. Here he manifests his own allegiance to Wolff and
Baumgarten, arguing that his conception of beauty as the internal
perfection of a work of art as it strikes the senses and imagination
is essentially the same as their conception of beauty as
“sensible perfection” (he draws no distinction between
Wolff and Baumgarten) (“Über des Herrn Professor Herz Versuch
über den Geschmack: An Herrn Salomon Maimon,” Werke,
volume II, pp. 923–7, at p. 525). In this work he also tries to
paper over any difference between himself and Kant, whose Critique
of the Power of Judgment had also appeared the year before, by
claiming that Kant's concept of “purposiveness without purpose
is nothing other than an ideal purpose,” and thus that Kant's
concept of beauty is essentially the same as Wolff's and his own
(ibid., p. 926). This is not true, because Moritz's conception of the
beauty of an individual work of art is that it is an intimation of the
true and objective order of nature as a whole, while Kant's notion of
purposiveness without purpose is that of a subjective state of mind in
which our mental powers of imagination and understanding are in a free
harmony that does not by itself represent anything at all. At least in
what Kant calls the “pure” judgment of taste, the
experience of beauty is pleasurable without meaning anything or
conveying any truth. As we will see, that is in fact only the
starting-point of Kant's aesthetics, and as he moves past his initial
analysis of “pure” or “free” beauty he does
add back into his view the beauties of truth that figured so
prominently for so many of his German predecessors up through Herder
and Moritz, as well as the beauty of utility that we saw to play a
large rôle in the British tradition, for example in Hume. But we
cannot appreciate the complexity of Kant's aesthetics unless we have
seen the separate approaches that he ultimately combines.

Immanuel Kant's only significant work in aesthetics, the Critique
of the Power of Judgment, came late in his life, at the end of
the extraordinary decade in which he had published the Critique of
Pure Reason (1781, revised 1787), the Prolegomena to any
future Metaphysics (1783), the Groundwork for the Metaphysics
of Morals (1785), the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science (1786), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788),
and a host of important essays on history, science, and theology as
well as philosophy. Although we take its existence for granted now,
Kant's third Critique could only have struck its original
audience as a surprising and puzzling work. It was surprising, because
the second critique had not announced a forthcoming third anymore than
the first had announced that there would be a second; and it was
puzzling, because the book not only gives an extended treatment to one
topic, namely aesthetic experience and judgment, which Kant had
previously denied could be the subject of a science (Critique of
Pure Reason, A 21/B 35–6), but also links that topic with
another, namely the teleological judgment of both organisms within
nature and of nature as a whole, to which Kant had never before linked
it. Clearly there must have been some revolution in Kant's conception
of the tasks of philosophy as well in his assessment of the prospects
of both aesthetics and teleology. This change in view both made it
imperative for him and enabled him to write this book, linking two
subjects that were not only disparate but that had also previously
been problematic for him, so soon after having completed his
exhausting labors on the first two critiques.

Kant does not immediately reveal a profound motivation for the new
book in either the first draft of its Introduction, the so-called
“first introduction” of 1789, or in the Preface or first
section of the published Introduction as well as several of its
subsequent sections. These are focused on the distinctions among the
several faculties of the mind and the divisions of philosophy. As a
result, the introductions make it seem as if Kant has been moved
primarily by a pedantic desire for completeness to find a place in his
system for two disciplines, aesthetics and teleology, that had been
discussed by many of his German, British, and French predecessors, but
that had apparently not played a large role in his own thought
heretofore. It seems that the main task of the third Critique
will be to introduce the conception of a new class of judgments or new
use of the power of judgment, “reflecting”
(reflektierend) judgment, which will subsume the aesthetic
and teleological judgment and demonstrate both their affinities with
and differences from the theoretical judgments analyzed and grounded
in the first Critique and the moral judgments treated in the
second Critique. However, Kant was driven to connect
aesthetic and teleological judgment by a much more profound and
powerful motivation than that of mere systematic housekeeping. This
deeper motivation is first revealed in the second section of the
published Introduction. Here Kant claims that there is a substantive
and important problem that calls for a third critique, namely that

Although there is an incalculable gulf fixed between the domain of the
concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of
freedom, as the supersensible, so that from the former to the latter
(thus by means of the theoretical use of reason) no transition is
possible, just as if there were so many different worlds, the first of
which can have no influence on the second: yet the
latter should have an influence on the former, namely the
concept of freedom should make the end that is imposed by its laws
real in the sensible world, and nature must consequently also be able
to be conceived in such a way that the lawfulness of its form is at
least in agreement with the possibility of the ends that are to be
realized in it in accordance with the laws of freedom. (CPJ,
Introduction, section II, 5:174–5; see also section IX,
5:195–6)

The problem that has apparently not been solved by the earlier two
critiques is that of showing that our choice to act in accordance with
the moral law, as the fundamental principle of all laws of freedom, a
choice that can be free only if it is conceived of as taking place in
a “supersensible” or noumenal realm that is not governed
by the deterministic laws of “sensible” or phenomenal
nature, where every event is fully determined by chains of causality
extending far back beyond any particular choice of any particular
individual, must nevertheless be efficacious within that phenomenal
world, able to transform the natural world into a “moral
world” where people really do act in accordance with the moral
law and the ends that are imposed upon us by that law really can be
realized. And the reason for linking aesthetic and teleological
judgment together in a third critique apparently must be that these
two forms of human experience and judgment together somehow offer a
solution to this problem.

But what problem about the efficacy of the laws of freedom in the
realm of nature could remain to be solved after the first two
critiques? The Critique of Pure Reason had argued that
although we can disprove the possibility of any breach in the
determinism of the natural world and cannot have theoretical knowledge
of the freedom of our will in the noumenal world, nevertheless we can
coherently conceive of the latter. And the Critique of Practical
Reason had argued that we can confidently infer the reality of
our noumenal freedom to choose to do whatever morality requires of us
from our immediate awareness of our obligation under the moral law
combined with the principle that if we ought to do something then we
must be able to do it (see Critique of Practical Reason,
§6, 5:30, and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason, 6:62, 66–7). The second Critique had also
argued that since morality imposes an end upon us, namely that of
realizing the highest good, the greatest happiness consistent with the
greatest virtue, we must believe this to be possible, and thus must
postulate “a supreme cause of nature having a causality in
keeping with the moral disposition” (Critique of Practical
Reason, Dialectic, 5:125; translation from Gregor, p. 240). If
Kant has already established that on the basis of our awareness of our
obligations under the moral law we can be confident that we have free
will and that all of the laws of nature are at least consistent with
our realization of the ends commanded by the moral law, what more
needs to be done in order to throw a bridge between the theoretical
cognition of nature and the laws of freedom?

As both the second critique and the preceding Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals make clear, Kant clearly recognizes that in
order to act morally, we need to (i) understand the moral law and what
it requires of us; (ii) believe that we are in fact free to choose to
do what it requires of us rather than to do what all our other
motives, which can be subsumed under the rubric of self-love, might
suggest to us; (iii) believe that the objectives that morality imposes
upon us can actually be achieved, and (iv) have an adequate motivation
for our attempt to do what morality requires of us in lieu of the mere
desirability of particular goals it might happen to license or even
impose in particular circumstances. All of these together constitute
the conditions of the possibility of morality. Kant also thinks that
at one level all these conditions are satisfied by pure practical
reason itself: (i) the very form of pure practical reason gives us the
moral law; (ii) the first “fact” of pure practical reason,
namely our consciousness of our obligation under this law, implies the
reality of our freedom to be moral by means of the principle that we
must be able to do what we know we ought to do; (iii) we can postulate
by pure practical reason alone that the laws of nature are compatible
with the demands of morality because both laws ultimately have a
common author; and finally (iv) pure respect for the moral law itself
can be a sufficient motivation for us to attempt to carry it out (and
attempts to do so have “moral worth” only when that is our
motivation). But Kant also recognizes that we are sensuous as well as
rational creatures, and need sensuous as well as rational presentation
and confirmation of the conditions of the possibility of morality. The
task of the third Critique will then be to show how both
aesthetic and teleological experience and judgment provide sensuous
confirmation of what we do already know in an abstract way, but also
need to feel or make palpable to ourselves, namely the efficacy of our
free choice of the fundamental principle of morality in the natural
world and the realizability of the objectives which that choice
imposes upon us, summed up in the concept of the highest
good. Specifically, Kant will argue that although in its purest form,
the free play of our understanding and imagination that constitutes
the experience of natural beauty does not presuppose any
judgment of moral value, the very fact of the existence of natural
beauty appears to confirm that the world is hospitable to our goals,
especially our moral goals, while our experiences of natural sublimity
and artistic beauty both involve the free play of our cognitive
powers with morally significant ideas, and thus are
distinctively aesthetic yet morally significant.

Following the canonical model introduced into eighteenth-century
aesthetics by Burke and transmitted into Germany by Mendelssohn, Kant
divides the first half of the Critique of the Power of
Judgment, the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of
Judgment,” into two main parts, the “Analytic of the
Beautiful” and the “Analytic of the Sublime.” But
Kant actually analyzes three main forms of aesthetic
experience—the experience of beauty, paradigmatically natural
beauty; the experience of the sublime, again paradigmatically of
sublimity in nature; and the experience of fine art—and each of
these forms of aesthetic experience ultimately reveals distinctive
connections to morality.

Starting from the claim that Francis Hutcheson had made in 1725 and
Mendelssohn reintroduced in 1785, Kant begins his analysis of the
judgment of taste, that is, our claim that a particular object is
beautiful, from the premise that our pleasure in a beautiful object
occurs independently of any interest in the existence of the object as
physiologically agreeable (CPJ, §3, 5:205–7) or as
good for some purpose expressed by a determinate concept of utility or
morality (CPJ, §4, 5:207–9). Yet he insists, a
judgment of taste does not express a merely idiosyncratic association
of pleasure with an object: to call an object beautiful is to speak
with a “universal voice,” to assert that the pleasure one
takes in the object is one that should be felt by anyone who responds
to the object, at least under ideal or optimal circumstances, even
though “there can also be no rule in accordance with which
someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful
(CPJ, §8, 5:216). How can one's pleasure in an object be
independent of its subsumption under any determinate concept and its
satisfaction of any determinate interest and yet be valid for all who
properly respond to the object? Kant's answer is that although our
pleasure in a beautiful object is not a response to its subsumption
under a determinate concept, it is an expression of the free play of
the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding that such an
object induces, and those cognitive faculties must in fact work the
same way in everyone. His underlying idea is that we experience a
beautiful object as having the kind of unity that we ordinarily find
in objects by subsuming them under a determinate concept, but
independently of any such subsumption. Because finding such unity is
our ultimate cognitive aim, we take pleasure in this discovery,
especially since the unity we find must appear contingent, as it were
unexpected, if it is not linked to any determinate concept
(see CPJ, Introduction VI, 5:186–7). (This is not to
say that we do not subsume an object we find beautiful under any
determinate concepts at all; we must if we are even to identify the
object of our pleasure and judgment of taste in any determinate
way. Kant's theory must rather be that when we find an object
beautiful we experience it as having a degree of unity that cannot be
explained by any of the determinate concepts under which we do subsume
it). Kant thus appeals to the concept of free play, hinted at by
Mendelssohn and developed further by Sulzer, to solve the problem of
taste that was emphasized by British aestheticians such as Hutcheson
and Hume, with whose works Kant was intimately familiar.

In this account, Kant makes two striking assumptions. First, he
asserts that in “pure” judgments of taste our pleasure in
beauty is a response only to the perceptible form of an
object, not to any matter or content it may have—for example, in
pictorial arts, “the drawing is what is
essential,” while the “colors that illuminate the
outline…can…enliven the object in itself for sensation,
but cannot make it…beautiful” (CPJ, §14,
5:225). Second, he assumes that the cognitive faculties of all human
beings work the same way, that is, respond to particular objects in
the same way, even when they are in “free play” rather
than at serious work. The second of these claims seems indefensible,
but Kant never backs off from it. The first of these claims also seems
unjustifiable, but this time Kant modifies his claim almost as soon as
he makes it. While he continues to maintain that in pure judgments of
taste our pleasure is in the unity of the form of the object alone, he
quickly recognizes that there are a variety of impure forms
of beauty where what we respond to with the free play of our
imagination and understanding is harmony between an object's
perceptible form and its matter, its content, or even its
purpose. Thus, just two sections after his assertion of formalism,
Kant introduces the category of “adherent beauty,” which
is the kind of harmony between an object's form and its intended
function that pleases us in a beautiful summer-house or racehorse; and
he will subsequently assume that successful works of fine art normally
have intellectual content and please us in virtue of the harmony among
their content, form, and material.

However, Kant interposes his analysis of the experience of the sublime
between his initial analysis of pure beauty and his later analysis of
fine art. Again following a hint that we have already found in
Mendelssohn, Kant recognizes two forms of the sublime: the
“mathematical” and the “dynamical.” Our
experience of both is a mixture of pain and pleasure, a moment of pain
due to an initial sense of the limits of imagination followed by
pleasure at the recognition that it is our own power of reason that
reveals the limits of our imagination. The mathematical sublime
involves the relationship between imagination and theoretical reason,
which is the source of our idea of the infinite; our experience of
this form of the sublime is triggered by the observation of natural
vistas so vast that our effort to grasp them in a
single image is bound to fail, but which then pleases us
because this very effort of the imagination reminds us that we have a
power of reason capable of formulating the idea of the
infinite (CPJ, §26, 5:254–5).

Kant holds that in this experience we do not just infer that
we have such a faculty, but actually experience “a
feeling that we have pure self-sufficient reason” (CPJ,
§27, 5:258). In the case of the dynamical sublime, what we
experience is a harmony between our imagination and practical
reason. This experience is induced by natural objects that seem not
just vast, but overwhelmingly powerful and
threatening—volcanoes, raging seas, and the like (CPJ,
§28, 5:261. Kant's examples were all commonplaces in the
eighteenth century, going back to Joseph Addison's illustrations of
“grandeur” in Spectator 412, June 1712). Here we
experience fear at the thought of our own physical injury or
destruction followed by the satisfying feeling that we have

within ourselves a capacity for resistance of
quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves
against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature,

namely,

our power (which is not part of nature) to regard
those things about which we are concerned (goods, health and life) as
trivial, and hence to regard its power (to which, to be sure, we are
subjected in regard to these things) as not the sort of dominion over
ourselves and our authority to which we would have to bow if it came
down to our highest principles and their affirmation or
abandonment. (CPJ, §28, 5:262)

Now we can turn to Kant's analysis of fine art and our experience of
it. For Kant, all art is intentional human production that requires
skill or talent, yet fine or “beautiful” (schöne)
art is produced with the intention of doing what anything beautiful
does, namely, promoting the free play of the cognitive powers. That a
work of fine art must be the product of intention and yet
produce the free play of the mental powers seems like the
paradox that “beautiful art, although it is certainly
intentional, must nevertheless not seem intentional”
(CPJ, §45, 5:306–7). Further, Kant also assumes
that although our pleasure in beauty should be a response to
the form of an object alone, fine art is paradigmatically
mimetic, that is, has representational or semantic content
(CPJ, §48, 5:311). This too seems like a paradox. Kant
aims to resolve both of these apparent paradoxes through his theory
that successful works of fine art are products of genius, a natural
gift that gives the rule to art (CPJ, §46, 5:307). A
work of genius must have “spirit,” which it gets through
its content, typically—as Kant assumes without argument,
although perhaps in his time, long before the invention of
non-objective art, without any real need for argument—a rational
idea, indeed an idea relevant specifically to morality. But in order
to be beautiful, a work of art must still leave room for the freedom
of the imagination, and therefore cannot present such ideas to us
directly and didactically (indeed, such ideas cannot be
directly and adequately presented in sensible form). Instead, a work
of art succeeds when it presents an “aesthetic idea,” a
representation of the imagination that “at least strive[s]
toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus
seek[s] to approximate a presentation of the concepts of
reason.” A successful work of art also “stimulates so much
thinking,” such a wealth of particular “attributes”
or images and incidents, “that it can never be grasped in a
determinate concept” (CPJ, §49,
5:314–15)—thereby stimulating a pleasurable feeling of
free play among the imagination, understanding, and reason while at
the same time satisfying the demand that a work of art have both a
purpose and a content.

We can now see how Kant thinks that our aesthetic experiences and
judgments can bridge the gulf between our abstract, intellectual
understanding of the requirements and conditions of morality and a
palpable, sensuous representation of those requirements and
conditions. Kant suggests six links between the aesthetic and moral,
which together make palpable the satisfaction of the four conditions
of the possibility of morality that were noted in the introduction to
the present section.

First, Kant evidently holds that objects of aesthetic experience can
present morally significant ideas to us without sacrificing what is
essential to them as objects of aesthetic response and judgment. This
is obvious in the theory of aesthetic ideas, where Kant indeed assumes
that works of art always have some morally relevant content. But this
view takes other forms as well. In fact, Kant maintains that all forms
of beauty, natural as well as artistic, can be regarded as expressions
of aesthetic ideas: even natural objects can suggest moral ideas to us
although such suggestion is not the product of any intentional human
activity (CPJ, §51, 5:319). In “The Ideal of
Beauty,” Kant also maintains that beauty in the human figure can
be taken as “the visible expression of moral ideas, which
inwardly govern human beings”; here he argues that only human
beauty can be taken as a unique standard for beauty, because it is the
only form of beauty that can express something absolutely and
unconditionally valuable, namely the moral autonomy of which humans
alone are capable. At the same time he holds there is no determinate
way in which this unique value can be expressed in the human form,
thus there is always something free in the outward expression in the
human figure of the inner moral value of the human character
(CPJ, §17, 5:235–6).

The second link is Kant's claim that the aesthetic experience of the
dynamical sublime is nothing other than a feeling of the power of our
own practical reason to accept the pure principle of morality and to
act in accordance with it in spite of all the threats or inducements
to do otherwise that nature might place in our way. Because the
experience of the dynamical sublime so centrally involves an
intimation of our own capacity to be moral, Kant actually insists that
“the sublime in nature is only improperly so called, and should
properly be ascribed only to the manner of thinking, or rather its
foundation in human nature” (CPJ, §30, 5:280). And
while he does not want to claim that this experience is identical to
explicit moral reasoning, but only a “disposition of the mind
that is similar to the moral disposition” (CPJ, General
Remark following §29, 5:268), he does in at least one place argue
that the complex character of the experience of the sublime makes it
the best representation in our experience of our moral situation
itself (CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:271).

However, Kant elsewhere argues, third, that there are crucial aspects
of our moral condition that are symbolized by the beautiful rather
than the sublime. He claims that the beautiful is the symbol of the
morally good because there are significant parallels between our
experience of beauty and the structure of morality. Indeed, he
insists that it is only insofar as the beautiful is the symbol of the
morally good that we have any right not merely to predict that under
ideal circumstances others should agree with our appraisals of beauty
but actually to demand that they do so (CPJ, §59,
5:353). Kant adduces “several aspects of this analogy,”
the most important of which is that

The freedom of the imagination (thus of
the sensibility of our faculty) is represented in the judging of the
beautiful as in accord with the lawfulness of the understanding (in
the moral judgment the freedom of the will is conceived as the
agreement of the latter with itself in accordance with universal laws
of reason). (CPJ, §59, 5:354)

Because the experience of beauty is an experience
of the freedom of the imagination in its play with the understanding,
it can be taken as a palpable symbol of the freedom of the will to
determine itself by moral laws that is necessary for morality but not
itself something that can be directly experienced. In other words, it
is the very independence of aesthetic response from direct
determination by concepts, including moral concepts, that makes the
experience of beauty an experience of freedom that can in turn
symbolize moral freedom. Presumably this can be reconciled with
Kant's earlier claim that the sublime is the most appropriate symbol
of morality by observing that while the experience of beauty makes
the freedom of the will palpable to us, it is only the mixed
experience of the sublime that brings home to feeling that this
freedom must often be exercised in the face of resistance offered by
our own inclinations.

Kant's fourth connection between the aesthetic and the ethical lies in
his theory of the “intellectual interest” in the
beautiful. Here Kant argues that although our basic pleasure in a
beautiful object must be independent of any antecedent interest in its
existence, we may add a further layer of pleasure to that basic
experience if the existence of beautiful objects suggests some more
generally pleasing fact about our situation in the world. Kant's
claim is that since it is of interest to practical reason that nature
be hospitable to its objectives, we take pleasure in any
evidence that nature is amenable to our objectives, even when those
are not specifically moral; and the natural existence of beauty is
such evidence, because the experience of beauty is itself an
unexpected fulfillment of our most basic cognitive
objective.

Kant's fifth claim is that aesthetic experience is conducive to proper
moral conduct itself. In his concluding comment on his analyses of
both the beautiful and the sublime he states that “The beautiful
prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the
sublime, to esteem it, even contrary to our (sensible) interest”
(CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:267), where being
able to love without any personal interest and to esteem even contrary
to our own interest are necessary preconditions of proper moral
conduct. Kant makes a similar point in his later Metaphysics of
Morals (1797) when he argues that “a propensity to wanton
destruction of what is beautiful in inanimate nature,”
even though we do not owe any moral duties directly to anything other
than ourselves and other human beings, nevertheless

weakens or uproots that feeling in [us] which,
though not of itself moral, is still a disposition of sensibility that
greatly promotes morality or at least prepares the way for it: the
disposition, namely, to love something (e.g., beautiful crystal
formations, the indescribable beauty of plants) even apart from any
intention to use it. (Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of
Virtue §17, 6:643; Gregor, p. 564)

Sixth and finally, in the brief “Appendix on the methodology of
taste,” Kant suggests that the cultivation or realization of
common standards of taste in a society can be conducive to the
discovery of the more general “art of the reciprocal
communication of the ideas of the most educated part” of a
society “with the cruder, the coordination of the breadth and
refinement of the former with the natural simplicity and originality
of the latter” (CPJ, §60, 5:356), where this art
is apparently necessary to the realization of the goal of
“lawful sociability,” or the establishment of a
stable polity on the basis of principles of justice rather than sheer
force. Thus, aesthetic experience can be conducive to the development
of sound politics as well as personal ethics, although the two are of
course not unconnected, since Kant is a political moralist who
believes that we have a moral duty to establish a just state, not
merely a prudential interest in doing so.

These six links between aesthetics and morality satisfy the four
conditions that need to be met in order to bridge the gulf between
nature and freedom by making our abstract grasp of the contents and
conditions of morality palpable to our sensuous nature. In particular,
(i) the presentation of moral ideas in objects of natural and artistic
beauty and especially in beautiful human form itself provides sensuous
illustration of moral ideas, above all the foundational idea of the
unconditional value of human freedom itself; (ii) the experiences of
the dynamical sublime and of the beautiful in their different ways
both confirm our abstract recognition of our own freedom always to
choose to do as morality requires; (iii) the intellectual interest in
the beautiful provides sensuous confirmation of nature's amenability
to our objectives, which is otherwise only a postulate of pure
practical reason; and (iv) the claims that the experiences of the
beautiful and the sublime and the sharing of these feelings among
different strata of highly diversified societies are conducive to the
realization of morality reveal ways in which our natural sensuous
dispositions can be used as means to the realization of the goal set
by our purely rational disposition to be moral.

In the history of ethics as well as aesthetics, mention of Kant is
often quickly followed by mention of Friedrich Schiller
(1759–1805), who criticized and developed Kant's views in both
areas. Perhaps best known to the general public as the author of the
“Ode to Joy” (An die Freude) that provides the
text for the fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, as well as the source of materials for operas by Rossini
and Verdi, in his lifetime Schiller was famous not only as a poet but
also as a dramatist, historian, and (at least during the first half
of the 1790s ) as an aesthetician and philosopher. As a student in
the military college of the Duke of Württemberg he trained as a
physician, and his earliest writings were on the mind-body
relationship. But he achieved instant fame with his play The
Robbers (Die Räuber) in 1782, and then had to flee
Württemberg in order to continue writing plays. Between 1783 and
1787, he wrote Fiesko, Intrigue and Love
(Kabale und Liebe), and Don Carlos. He met Goethe
in 1787, and was professor of history in nearby Jena from 1789 to
1799. During this period he wrote histories of the Thirty
Years’ War and the Dutch revolt against Spain. But he also
devoted several years in the early 1790s to an intensive study of
Kant, which then led to a series of essays including “On Grace
and Dignity” (Über Anmut und Würde, 1793), Letters
on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795), and “On
Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795–6), as well as the
unpublished “Kallias” letters on aesthetics (1793). After
this period, Schiller returned to his original calling, writing the
historical dramas Wallenstein (1798–9), Maria
Stuart (1800), The Maiden of Orleans (Die Jungfrau
von Orleans, 1801), The Bride of Messina (1803),
and Wilhelm Tell (1804). Like so many of the others who have
been discussed here (Baumgarten, Sulzer, Herz, Moritz) his life was
cut short by lung disease, presumably tuberculosis, and he died at
forty-five in 1805.

Schiller's “Kallias” letters, written to his friend
Gottfried Körner in January and February of 1793, were not
historically influential, since they were not published for another
half-century, but are fascinating reading today. In them Schiller
argues that Kant's “subjectivist” conception of free play
in aesthetic response has to be complemented with an
“objectivist” conception of beauty as the appearance of
freedom or self-determination in the object: a beautiful form
is one that appears to us to be determined not by any forces outside
of it but only by itself. For that reason “A form is beautiful,
one might say, if it demands no explanation, or if
it explains itself without a concept”
(“Kallias” letter of 18 February 1793, p. 155). Although
Schiller does not mention his name, his theory could also be
interpreted as an attempt to refine Moritz's conception of beauty as
that which is complete within itself. Had Kant known these letters,
however, he could have replied that Schiller's notions
of appearing to be self- rather than other-determined
and demanding no explanation are still subjective, that is,
they characterize how we respond to beautiful objects rather
than designating any properties that could be attributed to objects
independently of our response to them.

Unlike the “Kallias” letters, Schiller's essay “On
Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” was immediately influential. Here
Schiller describes the difference between “naïve” and
“sentimental” art. The former is an expression of an
immediate emotional response to nature, where nature is thought of as
“the subsistence of things on their own, being there according
to their own immutable laws” (a conception of nature that
derives from the conception of beauty in the “Kallias”
letters). The latter self-consciously expresses a sense of our own
separation from nature and a feeling that the self-subsistent things
in nature “are what we were” and
“what we should become once more” (“Naïve
and Sentimental Poetry,” pp. 180–1), or a longing for a
wholeness with nature that we think humans once had but that we have
lost. Schiller identifies naïve poetry with antiquity and sentimental
poetry (and the sense of alienation from nature it expresses) with
modernity. This essay can be seen as the source for the genre of
philosophical histories of aesthetics that then flourished for several
decades, beginning with Friedrich Schlegel's “On the Study of
Greek Poetry” of 1797, continuing with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling's lectures on The Philosophy of Art of
1802–3, and culminating in the lectures on “Philosophy of
Art or Aesthetics” that Hegel gave in Berlin during the
1820s—lectures that decisively changed the sense of the name
“aesthetics” itself from its original meaning of a general
science of sensibility that included responses to nature as well as
art to its modern meaning as the philosophy of art.

However, the two theoretical works by Schiller with which philosophers
have most concerned themselves have been the 1793 essay “On
Grace and Dignity” and the epistolary series On the
Aesthetic Education of Man, first written as an actual series of
letters to Schiller's patron the Danish Duke of Augustenberg in 1793
and then rewritten for publication in 1795. These have typically been
read as responses to Kant's moral philosophy, inspired by Kant in
their general concern for autonomy as the essence of morality but
criticizing Kant for giving inadequate consideration to the rôle of
sensibility in morality. “On Grace and Dignity” has been
held to argue, in supposed opposition to Kant, for the necessity of
developing feelings as part of what it takes to comply fully with the
demands of morality, while Aesthetic Education has been read
to argue that only the cultivation of aesthetic experience can
transform individuals and their society as morality demands; the first
of these can be considered a constitutive claim, and the second a
causal claim. It will be argued here, on the contrary, that Kant
actually makes greater claims for the significance and contribution of
both moral sentiments and aesthetic responses to the individual
achievement of morality than Schiller does. Specifically, while
“On Grace and Dignity” argues that the moral determination
of the will should be accompanied with certain moral sentiments on
what are essentially aesthetic grounds, Kant argues that the
virtuous determination of the will should be accompanied by certain
moral sentiments on moral grounds. And while Aesthetic
Education asserts that the development of taste is a necessary
condition for the development of individual morality and social
justice, which Kant never does, the variety of links that Kant
recognizes between aesthetics and morality, described in section
7.2. above, show that the cultivation of taste can make a broader
contribution to the realization of morality than Schiller
realizes.

We may begin with a different point about “On Grace and
Dignity,” however, namely that it is not primarily an essay in
moral theory at all, but an essay in aesthetics, that is, an essay
about the expression of moral qualities in the appearance of
actual human beings. In this regard it is not a critique of
Kantian moral theory but a critique of an aspect of
Kantian aesthetics, namely Kant's theory of the “ideal
of beauty” in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” in
the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Schiller's use of the
expression “ideal of beauty” very early in his essay
signals that this is his primary target (“On Grace and
Dignity,” NA 253; Curran 126).

Kant introduces the concept of the “ideal of beauty” in
the third moment of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” which
discusses the various relations that obtain between beauty and
purposiveness. Kant begins the third moment by arguing that in its
purest form the judgment of taste is a response to the mere appearance
of the form of purposiveness in an object, as opposed to any actual
purposiveness, in either of the senses of that concept, namely,
actually serving some specific purpose or having been designed to
serve some purpose. Correspondingly, Kant equates pure beauty with the
mere form or appearance of purposiveness rather than with actual
purposiveness. However, as we saw in section 7.1, Kant complicates his
analysis by recognizing forms of beauty that are not pure but are
connected with (although not reducible to) the recognition of actual
purposiveness. The first of these forms is “adherent
beauty,” a beauty of form that is consistent with or appropriate
for the actual purpose of an object that clearly has a purpose that
constrains its possible form in various ways, such as an arsenal or a
race horse. Then Kant comes to the “ideal of beauty,” or
“the highest model, the archetype of taste…in accordance
with which [anyone] must judge everything that is an object of
taste,” a representation of an individual object or particular
type of object that is maximally beautiful (CPJ, §17,
5:232).

Kant signals that the search for an ideal of beauty is not something
initiated by the logic of taste as such but by something external to
taste, namely, the faculty of reason: the “archetype of
taste…rests on reason's indeterminate idea of a maximum.”
Kant argues that

the beauty for which an idea [or ideal] is to be
sought cannot be a vague beauty, but there must be a
beauty fixed by a concept of objective purposiveness,
consequently it must not belong to the object of an entirely pure
judgment of taste, but rather to one of a partly intellectualized
judgment of taste. (CPJ, §17, 5:232–3)

This means that the ideal of beauty is a species
of adherent rather than free beauty. Kant then argues that there are
two elements in such an ideal, namely a uniquely valuable purpose or
end and a uniquely appropriate aesthetic expression of this purpose
or end. “The human being alone is capable of an ideal
of beauty,” Kant then argues, because “the
humanity in his person, as intelligence, is alone among all the
objects in the world capable of the ideal
of perfection” (ibid., 5:233). That is, according to
(practical) reason the human being is the only thing of unconditional
value. But for this ideal to be an ideal of beauty, the unique moral
value of humanity must find an outward expression which is somehow
appropriate for it although it is not connected to it in accordance
with any rule. This expression is found in the beauty of the
“human figure,” which is associated “with
the morally good in the idea of the highest
purposiveness—goodness of soul, or purity, or strength, or
repose, etc.”—not in accordance with any rule but simply
by “great force of the imagination” (ibid., 5:235).
Imagination is in fact doubly involved: first, because there is no
way to derive what counts as beauty in the human figure from mere
concepts or by any mechanical process (that could yield only
“correctness in the presentation of the species”), so the
ideal of maximum beauty can only be created by an act of the
aesthetic imagination; and second, because there is no rule that says
that moral value must be expressed in outward appearance or that
outward appearance can be interpreted as an expression of moral
value, but that association too must be created by the
imagination.

Schiller's first goal in “On Grace and Dignity” is to show
that Kant's account of the ideal of beauty is not sufficiently precise
in its account of what aspects of human beauty can be taken as an
expression of the moral condition of a human being. He also contends
that Kant's account does not offer an adequate explanation of why any
features of the outward appearance should be taken as an expression of
moral condition. More specifically, Schiller argues that there are two
different moral conditions of human beings, grace and dignity, and
these naturally find different external expressions in the appearance
of human beings, and by implication in the artistic representation or
mimesis of them. As a result, the ideal of beauty is more complicated
than Kant recognizes. Moreover, there are good reasons why these moral
conditions should find external expression, so the connection between
moral condition and aesthetic result is much less arbitrary than Kant
makes it seem.

On Schiller's account, Kant's first mistake is to locate the ideal of
beauty vaguely in the human figure rather than specifically
in the bodily accompaniments of intentional actions that are
the products of the human will, which, according to Kant
himself, is the primary locus of moral value. This also means that it
is a mistake for Kant to suggest, if that is what he means, that the
ideal of beauty can be found in a general type of human being rather
than in particular human beings, for actions are always done by
particular human beings. Kant is of course committed to the general
thesis that beauty is always a property of a particular, but it might
be argued that he has lost sight of that commitment when he locates
the ideal of beauty in something as general as “the human
figure” as the expression of human morality. Schiller argues
that the “architectonic beauty of the human form,” that
is, the fixed configuration of the features of a person's appearance,
“comes directly from nature and is formed by the rule of
necessity” (“On Grace and Dignity,” NA 255; Curran
127), and thus cannot plausibly be taken as an expression of the moral
character or condition of a person, which is determined by the
person's will or free choice. Any aspect of beauty that can be
interpreted as an expression of moral condition must thus be found in
the voluntary actions of particular persons rather than in
their fixed features. More specifically, grace, as a condition in
which a person is not merely committed to doing what morality requires
as a matter of principle but is also so committed to doing this that
it has become part of his character and thus seems as much natural as
voluntary, is revealed in the motions that accompany a
person's directly willed actions but are not themselves consciously
willed (“On Grace and Dignity,” NA 167; Curran 136). For
example,

one can deduce from a person's words how he
would like to be viewed, but what he really is must
be guessed from the gestures accompanying the speech, in other words,
from the uncontained movements. (“On Grace and
Dignity,” NA 268; Curran 137)

It is in the unintentional accompaniments of
intentional actions that we can discern people's real commitment to
what they are doing and the ease with which they make that
commitment; the latter is grace, and thus the movements that express
that are the expression of grace. Grace can be expressed in the
“rigid and restful features” of an individual's
physiognomy only insofar as those features themselves “were
originally nothing other than movements that through frequent
repetition became habitual and left lasting traces” (“On
Grace and Dignity,” NA 264; Curran 134).

The next part of Schiller's aesthetic argument against Kant is that
dignity is a different moral condition than grace, and that it
therefore naturally finds a different outward expression. While grace
is the expression of a condition in which there is no tension between
a person's moral commitments and his desires, and where there is thus
harmony between the explicitly willed aspects of his intentional
motions and the instinctive aspects of them, dignity is the sensible
expression of successfully willing to act in accordance with moral
principles even at the cost of the suppression of conflicting desires
and feelings, and is therefore manifest in quite different aspects of
appearance than grace is. In a person expressing dignity rather than
grace,

while his veins swell, his muscles become cramped
and taut, his voice cracks, his chest is thrust out, and his lower
body pressed in, his intentional movements are gentle, the facial
features relaxed, and the eyes and brow serene….this
contradiction of signs demonstrates the existence and influence of a
power independent of suffering and above the impressions to which we
see the sensuous succumb. And in this way, peace in
suffering, in which dignity actually consists, becomes the
representation of intelligence in human beings and the expression
their moral freedom. (“On Grace and Dignity,”; NA
295–6; Curran 159–60)

As Schiller sums up, “Grace, then, lies in
the freedom of intentional movements, dignity in
the mastery of instinctive ones” (“On Grace and
Dignity,” NA 297; Curran 160). Grace expresses a tendency to
act as morality requires that has become instinctive, while dignity
expresses mastery grounded on moral principles over instincts that
are not harmonious with morality. These are two different moral
conditions, and thus find two different forms of visible
expression.

Although Schiller's illustration of both grace and dignity refer to
our perceptions of actual human beings rather than to artistic
representations of them, that is not an objection to reading his
account as a critique of Kant's conception of the ideal of beauty. In
the “Analytic of the Beautiful” Kant himself is talking
primarily about the beauty of nature rather than art, and in the
section on the ideal of beauty he is clearly talking about a special
feature of human beauty itself rather than of the artistic
representation of human beauty. Any implications of either Kant's
account or of Schiller's critique of it for the case of artistic
representation would have to be inferred. But of course many of the
features in which Schiller locates both grace and dignity could be
represented in artistic depictions of human beings, and that is why it
is not implausible to suggest that his account may be directed against
Lessing as well as Kant. Schiller's contrast between swelling veins,
cramped muscles, and outhrust chest on the one hand and serenity of
eye and brow on the other could be taken as a plausible description of
the famous statue of Laocoön, and thus Schiller could be read as
suggesting, in the spirit of Winckelmann, that the statue should be
understood as an expression of dignity in the face of suffering rather
than as a symbol for the differences between pictorial and verbal
depiction. On Schiller's account, however, the dignity of of the
unnamed Laocoön would be explained by the moral character of the
individual, not by the circumstances of a whole people.

As earlier mentioned, “On Grace and Dignity” has
traditionally been read as a critique of Kant's moral theory rather
than of his aesthetics, arguing for greater moral significance for
feelings in line with our principled commitment to morality than Kant
acknowledges. It looks as if Schiller holds that the ideal for moral
conduct is that complete attunement between the determination of the
will by moral principles and our natural and instinctive desires and
inclinations that is expressed in grace. Further, it seems that this
is only because he recognizes that such attunement will not always be
possible for human beings that he admits that there is sometimes a
need for that mastery over refractory feelings that expresses itself
in dignity—but only as a fall-back or second-best state of
character, rather than, as Kant seems to suppose, the norm for the
human moral condition.

This is a misreading of the positions of both Schiller and Kant,
however. For Schiller, that complete attunement of principle and
feeling that expresses itself in grace is indeed an imperative, but
an aesthetic demand rather than a strictly moral
demand. Thus Schiller writes,

Human beings, as
appearance, are also an object of the senses. Where the moral
feeling finds satisfaction, the aesthetic feeling does not
wish to be reduced, and the correspondence with an idea may not
sacrifice any of the appearance. Thus, however rigorously reason
demands an ethical expression, the eye demands beauty just as
persistently….both these demands are made of the same object,
although they come from different courts of judgment. (“On Grace
and Dignity,” NA 277; Curran 144–5)

But as far as morality alone is concerned, the
mastery of will over inclination that is expressed in dignity is all
that is required. For Kant, however, morality itself demands
a complete harmony between principle and inclination, because any
tension between them is a sign that one's commitment to the principle
of morality is not yet complete, one's good will or virtue not yet
perfected. The self-mastery that is expressed in dignity may often be
all that human beings can achieve under natural circumstances, and it
certainly satisfies the demand for legality in our actions;
but as Kant sees it morality requires that perfection of
virtue or of the good will that he calls holiness (see Kant's
response to Schiller in a note added to the second edition of
Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,
6:23–4n.). Thus Kant's conception of morality actually demands
a greater attunement of principles and feelings than does
Schiller's—although Schiller's might be the more plausible
account of morality, that is, one that better accommodates the
reality of the human condition, precisely for that reason. Indeed,
Kant may have been carried away by the polemic with Schiller, because
elsewhere his position is not that human beings must aim at holiness,
but only at virtue, not at the elimination of all inclinations
contrary to morality but at the strength of will to overcome
them,

By contrast, in Schiller's other main philosophical work, the
letters On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, he seems to
make a much bolder claim than Kant would ever have countenanced,
namely that “it is only through Beauty that man makes his way
to Freedom” and thus to the achievement of morality and its
external realization in political justice (Aesthetic
Education, Second letter, p. 9). Here Schiller implies that the
cultivation of taste through aesthetic education is a necessary as
well as sufficient condition for the achievement of compliance with
the ethical and political demands of morality, rather than, as Kant
held, merely something that may contribute to moral development. But
when we turn from Schiller's rhetoric to the details of his argument,
we will see that he actually grants aesthetic education a narrower
rôle in the realization of morality than Kant does.

Schiller presents the problem to be solved by aesthetic education in
several ways, but primarily as a political rather than a moral
problem. In his Sixth Letter, he offers an influential diagnosis of
alienation or fragmentation as the characteristic problem of
modernity: “we see not merely individuals, but whole classes of
people, developing but one part of their potentialities, while of the
rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain.”
(Aesthetic Education, p. 33). Although this is a problem for
human flourishing generally, and might therefore be considered a moral
rather than specifically political problem, Schiller's diagnosis of
the source of this problem gives a prominent role to a specifically
political cause. Schiller claims that the complex machinery of the
state necessitates the separation of ranks and occupations, rather
than claiming, as a Marxist diagnosis of alienation would, that a
separation of ranks and occupations that has its source in the
conditions of production necessitates the complex machinery of the
state. In another famous passage, Schiller presents the problem as
that of effecting the transition from a less just to a more just state
without killing the patient in the operation:

The state should not only respect the objective
and generic character in its individual subjects; it should also honor
their subjective and specific character, and in extending the
invisible realm of morals take care not to depopulate the sensible
realm of appearance. (Aesthetic Education, Fourth Letter, p.
19)

The latter passage leads more directly to
Schiller's most general characterization of the problem: striking the
right balance between the universal and the particular, that is, not
realizing the ideal at the cost of individuals nor so focusing on
individuals as they currently are that all concern for the ideal is
lost. Schiller characterizes the tension he is concerned with through
a number of contrasts: person and condition, the atemporal and the
temporal, noumenon and phenomena, form and matter, and so on
(Eleventh Letter). He posits that we are driven in one direction by
the “form drive” and in the other by the “sensuous
drive” (Twelfth Letter). He then claims that we need to
cultivate a new drive, the “play drive” (Fourteenth
Letter), to bring these two drives, and thus person and condition,
universal and particular, and so on, into proper balance with each
other, “to preserve the life of sense against the encroachments
of freedom; and second, to secure the personality against the forces
of sensation” (Thirteenth Letter). Schiller's claim is then
that it is the experience of beauty which will induce this balance in
us, and thus what we need is to be educated to experience beauty. In
practice, since individuals tend to err in one direction or the
other, that is, to be driven by principles at the cost of ignoring
particulars or to be absorbed in particulars and thus inadequately
attentive to principles, there will be two types of beauty,
“energizing” beauty and “relaxing” or
“melting” beauty, which will either strengthen an
individual's commitment to principle or relax the grip of principle
on an individual, whichever is needed (Seventeenth Letter).

These claims are grandiose and abstract. In a crucial footnote to the
Thirteenth Letter, however, Schiller comes down to earth, and reveals
that what he expects from aesthetic education is something quite
specific, although for that reason all the more plausible. What he
worried about is “the pernicious effect, upon both thought and
action, of an undue surrender to our sensual nature” on the one
hand and “the nefarious influence exerted upon our knowledge and
upon our conduct by a preponderance of rationality” on the
other. In the realm of scientific inquiry, what we need to learn and
what we can learn from aesthetic experience is not to “thrust
ourselves out upon [nature], with all the impatient anticipations of
our reason,” without having collected adequate data to support
our theorizing. In the realm of conduct, thus of the moral generally
and not just the realm of politics, what we need to learn is to be
specifically attentive to the particular circumstances, needs, and
feelings of others, and not just to impose our own views upon others
without taking all this into account. Schiller's argument comes down
to the claim that through the cultivation of our aesthetic sensibility
we can learn to be attentive to detail and particularity as well as to
principle and generality, and that being so attentive is a necessary
condition for both theoretical and practical success. And it seems
plausible to suppose that this claim is true, and therefore that
aesthetic education may play a valuable rôle in the theoretical and
practical development of human beings, in modern society as much as in
any other. But this is a far cry from any claim that aesthetic
education is sufficient for either theoretical or moral
development, or even that it is necessary for such
development, as the only way to cultivate the necessary
combination of sensitivities. In the case of the natural sciences,
surely both their general principles and their particular techniques
of observation must be taught directly, and presumably a well-managed
scientific education could also teach the student not to project the
principles unchecked by the data. In the case of morals and politics,
surely the general principles must be clearly fixed in the mind of
those being initiated into the relevant community, as well as a proper
empathy for the actual circumstances of others; but while perhaps the
latter could be cultivated by aesthetic education, presumably it could
also be cultivated directly by suitably edifying moral discourses, and
certainly the general principles of morality will still have to be
directly taught or elicited.

As we saw in section 7.2, Kant recognizes these limits on the
significance of the cultivation of taste for moral development, but
also described a wider variety of ways in which the former could be
beneficial for the latter. The contribution to moral development that
Schiller hopes to derive from aesthetic education is
essentially cognitive: through the sensitivity to
particularity that we acquire from aesthetic education we learn
to recognize the circumstances, needs, and feelings of others
and thereby to apply our principles to them appropriately. Kant,
however, holds that aesthetic experience could give us sensible
confirmation of the moral truths we already know through pure reason,
but it also give us emotional support in our attempt to act as we know
we should, although in no case does he argue that the support that
morality can get from aesthetic experience is indispensable. Thus,
although Schiller's essay “On Grace and Dignity” appears
to argue for a greater rôle for feelings in fulfillment of the demands
of morality than Kant allows, actually it is only Kant who insists
upon moral grounds for striving to realize grace and not just
dignity. And while Schiller's letters On Aesthetic Education
insist that aesthetic education is a necessary condition for social
justice, Kant actually has a broader conception of the contributions
that aesthetic experience may make to moral and political development,
although he certainly does not make the cultivation of taste a
necessary (let alone sufficient) condition for the realization of
morality.

In the five years after the publication of Schiller's Letters on
Aesthetic Education in 1795, both Romanticism and Absolute
Idealism emerged, the former in works by Friedrich von Hardenburg
(“Novalis”) and Friedrich Schlegel, the latter in works by
Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. But
since both of these movements blossomed more fully in the early
decades of the nineteenth century, they will not be included in this
survey. Instead, it will conclude with a second look at the work of
Johann Herder, in this case with his late critique of Kant's aesthetic
theory. Herder, who as we saw had done the bulk of his work in
aesthetics long before the publications of Kant and Schiller, indeed
even before the publication of Sulzer's encyclopedia, reacted
violently to the new aesthetics of play in his late
work Kalligone (1800), i.e., “The Birth of
Beauty.” This work, published only three years before Herder's
death and after his renown had been eclipsed by such new stars as
Schelling and Fichte, has never received much attention, but beneath
its bursts of ill-temper it contains interesting and important
criticisms of Kant. The theme of Kalligone may be summed up
with this statement from its table of contents: “Nothing harms
immature taste more than if one makes everything into play”
(Kalligone, p. 660). Herder's critique came too late in his
Kant's life for him to respond to it. If he had been able to respond,
he would have had no good reply to some of Herder's criticisms; but if
Herder had had more sympathy for Kant's expository method in the
third Critique, he might have realized that on some of the
central substantive points of his criticism the distance between
himself and Kant is not as great as it initially seems. In particular,
Herder's representation of Kant's aesthetics as a pure theory of
mental play mistakes Kant's initial analysis of the simplest form of
natural beauty for his whole theory of natural and artistic beauty. If
Herder had recognized the importance for Kant of the more complicated
cases of adherent and artistic beauty, he would have seen that there
is considerable common ground between Kant's aesthetics of free play
and his own aesthetics of the sensory apprehension of truth.

Herder's criticisms of Lessing and Riedel (section 5.1) prefigure
several of his objections to Kant. He objects to Kant's abstract
method in aesthetics, to his failure to emphasize adequately the rôle
of the senses and the differences among them both in his account of
aesthetic experience and in his classification of the arts, to an
inadequate recognition of the importance of truth (indeed truth in
several senses ) in our experience of art, and to what he sees as
Kant's inadequate emphasis on the way in which aesthetic experience
gives us a feeling of being alive. But what is missing from Herder's
early critical aesthetics is an objection to the aesthetics of play,
for the simple reason that Kant had not yet made that prominent in
German aesthetics. In turning now to Herder's criticisms of Kant
in Kalligone, we will have to add that objection to his list
of charges.

Kalligone is a polemic against Kant's Critique of the
Power of Judgment, more precisely against its first half, the
“Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” loosely
structured in parallel with Kant's work, although with numerous
digressions, sometimes even in dialogue form, and statements of
Herder's own positions. Like Herder's polemic with Lessing in
the Groves of Criticism, his response to Kant's work is
longer than its target, and not all of its themes can be discussed
here. In ways anticipated in Herder's earlier work, Kalligone
attacks Kant's methodology and his neglect of the concrete rôle of the
senses in a discipline that is, as defined by Baumgarten, supposed to
focus precisely on them. In an expression of the naturalism that
pervades his work, Herder also attacks Kant's appeals to the
“supersensible” in his interpretation of aesthetic
experiences, especially the experience of sublimity. But Herder's most
vehement objections are to Kant's insistence upon the
disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment and to his exclusion of a rôle
for determinate concepts in the free play of the mental powers in
aesthetic experience, which Herder sees as excluding any rôle for the
knowledge of truth in aesthetic experience. We will focus here on
Herder's criticisms of the disinterestedness and non-conceptuality of
aesthetic judgment.

Herder's general theory of aesthetic experience is that it is an
experience of well-being arising from a perception of the
true order of nature, which he opposes to Kant's theory of
the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience and
attachment. Before we turn to that central issue, however, we may note
Herder's objection that Kant's aesthetics does not pay sufficient
attention to the concrete rôle of the senses in aesthetic
experience. The charge of insensitivity to the specificity of the
senses, as we saw, was at the heart of Herder's early aesthetics,
beginning with his critique of Lessing, and it manifests itself in
various ways in his critique of Kant. One point at which it is
particularly clear is in his objection to Kant's scheme for the
classification of the fine arts, a scheme based on the differing
capacities of different media for meaning, tone, and gesture that
Herder claims “throws us back into the old chaos.” Kant's
basic division is between the verbal (redende) and the
formative or visual (bildende) arts, and Herder says that
Kant's account of the

so-called verbal arts [is] built upon
a word-play, which makes them…into play, and not in
the technical sense of this word; and about the formative
arts as well as about the arts that effect sentiments nothing is said
that serves for the essence of each and the essence of
all. (Kalligone, p. 939)

By contrast, Herder argues that any division of the arts, as well
as any account of the way in which different arts need to be
cultivated and contribute to our overall cultivation and development,
must attend to the specificity of our senses. For Herder, any
classification of the arts, and indeed any theory of aesthetic
education and the contribution of aesthetic education to general
education, must be based upon a firm grasp of the differences as well
as the similarities among sight, hearing, touch, speech, and song (for
that too is among the arts of the tongue). In his view Kant does not
have that grasp. Nor does it seem too much of a stretch to think that
Schiller's theory of aesthetic education is deficient in this regard,
too. Although Herder does not mention Schiller by name anywhere
in Kalligone, he does begin the work by bemoaning the
influence of Kant's third Critique upon his followers, and
Schiller might be supposed to be the foremost among these, albeit one
with whom Herder had to maintain cordial relations in Weimar and
perhaps spared for this reason.

We may now turn to the two main topics of Herder's criticism, namely
Kant's theory of the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment and of
his doctrine of the purposeless play of imagination and understanding
as the basis of such judgment. Herder had already expressed doubt
about disinterestedness as a fundamental aesthetic category in his
polemic with Riedel in the fourth Grove, where he had
rejected Riedel's definition of the beautiful as “that which can
please without an interested aim [interessierte Absicht] and
which also can please if we do not possess it” (“Fourth
Grove,” p. 291). At that time, however, Herder's objection
seemed to be only that the concept of disinterestedness is not
“original,” that is, that disinterestedness by itself
cannot explain our pleasure in the beautiful and thus could
at best be a consequence of some more fundamental explanation of
beauty. In Kalligone, however, he argues much more broadly
that our pleasure in beauty is not disinterested, but rather
that it is intimately connected with our most fundamental interest,
our interest in life itself. He does this by rejecting Kant's rigid
distinction between the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good,
arguing that all of these notions are intimately connected and that
they all reflect our fundamental interest in enjoying a harmonious,
well-adapted life.

The first step in Herder's argument is to reject Kant's identification
of agreeableness with sensory gratification narrowly understood. For
Herder, the agreeable (angenehm) is what actually liberates
and strengthens me and gives me a feeling of liberation and strength,
of not merely being alive but of living freely and strongly. This
feeling can come through the engagement of any or all of my senses:

whatever preserves, promotes, expands, in short
is harmonious with the feeling of my existence, each
of my senses gladly accepts that, appropriates that to itself, and
finds it agreeable.

What gives us such feelings is moreover
universally pleasing, because “well-being, welfare,
health” (Wohlsein, Heil, Gesundheit) are the
“ground and end of the existence of every living thing…We
all desire well-being, and whatever promotes this well-being in any
way is agreeable” (Kalligone, p. 668).

With the agreeable so broadly conceived, it is then easy for Herder to
suggest that the beautiful cannot be rigidly separated from it, but
must rather be more like a species of it, namely that which gives us
such agreeable feelings of well-being through the “noble
senses,” through figures, colors, tones, and the re-creation of
all of these through the artificial signs of literary language. To be
sure, there are specific contexts in which we might call something
that is disagreeable good, or something that is beautiful
disagreeable, but these are the exceptions, not the rule—a
medicine that is good for one, for example, may nevertheless be
disagreeable (Kalligone, pp. 672–3n.). But although the
agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, which Kant construed as three
fundamentally “different relations of representations to the
feeling of pleasure and displeasure” (CPJ, §5,
5:209), do have to be distinguished in certain contexts, they
nevertheless are all expressions of our pleasure in a free and healthy
life. Given this assumption, it is then not hard for Herder to argue
that so far from being disinterested, our pleasure in beauty is
necessarily of the greatest interest to us. But while he argues that
the beautiful necessarily interests us, Herder also insists that the
beautiful does not appeal to self-interest
or self-love: the pleasure and interest in the genuinely
beautiful as well as the agreeable and good is universal, not personal
or idiosyncratic.

It could well be argued that this is all that Shaftesbury originally
meant when he introduced the concept of disinterestedness into modern
moral and aesthetic discourse. For him, the opposite of disinterested
is mercenary, that which one wants or does just for a
personal reward (Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, Part II,
Section III, in Characteristicks, vol. I, p. 55). And this
is arguably all that Riedel meant when he said that the beautiful is
that which can please us “without possession.” It would
not be reasonable, however, to claim that all that Kant meant by
saying that the pleasure in beauty is disinterested is that it must be
able to please anyone apart from personal possession and use or
consumption of the beautiful object. He certainly seems to insist that
the source of our pleasure in the beautiful has nothing to do with the
sources of our pleasure in the agreeable and the good. Kant is
apparently open to Herder's criticism, if indeed Herder's claim is
that our pleasures in the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good all
ultimately rest on our pleasure in the feeling of free and healthy
life. However, before we consider whether the distance here between
Kant and Herder is as great as Herder thinks, let us consider one last
charge on Herder's indictment of Kant, namely his objection to Kant's
theory that the experience of beauty is an experience of a free and
conceptless play of the mental powers of imagination and
understanding.

As noted earlier, Herder's antipathy to Kant's central notion of the
free play of our cognitive powers is evident from the outset
of Kalligone. In his Preface, Herder writes bitterly that
“the self-named only possible philosophy” has
transformed the arts “into a short or long, boring
apelike play” (Kalligone, p. 648). In the body of
the text, Herder argues both generally that all response to objects,
feeling and sentiment as well as judgment, is accompanied with a
concept of the object. He also argues that, more specifically, our
pleasure in beautiful objects is always a pleasure in a sensed or felt
recognition of their adaptation to their environment, whether natural
or artificial, that is impossible without the application of a concept
to the object. Herder launches his general attack immediately
following his critique of Kant's first moment. Kant's second moment,
Herder says, asserts that the “beautiful is what
pleases without a concept,” and the third speaks of a
“Form of purposiveness without representation of an
end.” In Herder's view, however, “ [t]hat something could
please without a concept, and indeed please universally, is contrary
to nature and experience” (Kalligone,
p. 675). Depending on how we take this claim, of course, Herder may
not be saying anything with which Kant would disagree: Kant more than
anyone else argues that all experience of an object requires
consciousness of a concept as well as of empirical intuitions of that
object, the matter of which is sensation. But he also holds that we
could have a feeling of pleasure in an object
without considering what concepts apply to it, and on the
basis of such a feeling make the judgment that it is beautiful. Herder
is specifically rejecting that claim. On what basis does he do so?

He does so by means of the more particular argument that our pleasure
in beauty is in fact a pleasure in our sensed or felt recognition of
an object's adaptation to its environment, together with the premise
that such a pleasure cannot be felt without a recognition of the
application of a relevant concept to the object. Herder argues for
this premise by going through a series of cases, precisely the kinds
of particular examples that he accuses Kant of neglecting. First he
considers figures (Gestalten), then colors and tones, and
then a series of kinds of natural things, from stones and crystals to
a series of living things ranging from flowers to human beings. In all
of these cases, he argues, we respond to a recognition of the
character of a thing and its relation to its environment that is
necessarily mediated by our application of a concept to it. Before we
consider whether this is a fair objection to Kant, more generally
whether there is as much distance between Kant's views and Herder's as
Herder himself believes, let us ask why Herder thinks such perception
of an object's essence and its well-being in its environment is so
pleasing to us and so important for our own sense of well-being.

The answer to this question is what we might call a harmonic or
sympathetic theory of the connection between pleasure in well-being
and truth: Herder thinks that the perception of true harmony and
well-being in the things around us generates a parallel harmony and
feeling of it in ourselves:

May we not rejoice that we live in a world of
good order and good form [Wohlordnung und Wohlgestalt],
where all results of the laws of nature in gentle forms reveal to us
as it were a band of rest and motion, an elastic-effective constancy
of things, in short beauty as the bodily expression of a corporeal
perfection that is harmonious both within itself and to our
feeling? (Kalligone, p. 687)

The key idea here is not that we take pleasure in the direct
consumption of the fruits of a harmonious nature, but rather that
there is a kind of resonance between harmony and well-being in nature
and our own sense of well-being: the perception of harmony in nature
makes our own being feel well-ordered, just as the perception of
disharmony in nature inevitably although painfully attracts our
attention. This is the underlying vision of Herder's mature
aesthetics: our feeling of beauty does not arise from a free play with
forms that might be triggered by something in the objective world but
is not constrained by it. Rather, the feeling of beauty is a
subjective response to the perception of objective harmony, a
subjective feeling of well-being triggered by empathy with the
well-being of other things in the world.

However, on several central points the differences between Kant and
Herder are not quite as great as the latter supposed. First, Kant
himself interpreted the feeling of the free play of the cognitive
powers in aesthetic experience as a feeling of life, and thus at the
deepest level his conception of the source of aesthetic pleasure is
not that different from Herder's. Second, although Kant began his
analysis with the simplest case of the free judgment of natural
beauty, which is supposedly not dependent upon our conceptualization
of its object, it does not end there. As he complicated his analysis
of aesthetic experiences to include the cases of the adherent beauty
of works of nature as well as of human art in the general sense and of
fine art in particular, Kant clearly recognized the rôle of
conceptualization in our response to the work, and in the case of art
in the production as the well the reception of the work, and
transformed his conception of free play with the mere form of an
object into a conception of felt harmony between the form and the
concept of the object which is not so different from Herder's
conception of the harmony in a beautiful object. Finally, when Kant
complicated his initial conception of the disinterestedness of
aesthetic judgment to take account of our intellectual interest in the
existence of natural beauty, he recognized that our experience of
beauty is an experience of well-being and being at home in the world
that is not unrelated to Herder's conception of our experience of
beauty. Nevertheless, as Kant's terminology suggests, his conception
of this interest may have remained more intellectual and moralistic
than Herder himself would prefer.

Indeed, in his lectures on anthropology—which he began offering
only in 1772–73, thus a decade after Herder had studied with
him—Kant had made the connection between the free play of the
faculties and the feeling of life clear and central to his aesthetic
theory. There Kant argued that “Gratification or pleasure is
the feeling of the promotion of life,” indeed that life itself
“is the consciousness of a free and regular play of all the
powers and faculties of human beings.” He equated the free play
of our powers and faculties with their unhindered activity, and thus
found the ultimate source of all pleasure in the unhindered activity
of our powers:

The play of the powers of the mind
[Gemüths Kräfte] must be strongly alive and free if
it is to animate. Intellectual pleasure consists in the consciousness
of the use of freedom in accordance with rules. Freedom is the
greatest life of the human being, through which he exercises his
activity without hindrance. (Vorlesungen über
Anthropologie, 27:559–60)

In fact, Kant completes this discussion, which
opens his lectures on the second part of psychology, on the faculties
of approval and disapproval, with the remark that “All
gratifications are related to life. Life, however, is a unity, and in
so far as all gratifications aim at this, they are all homogeneous,
let the sources from which they spring be what they are” (ibid.,
p. 561). Herder could have included these sentences in the footnote
from Kalligone (pp. 672–3) in which he objects to
Kant's supposedly complete separation of the beautiful from the
agreeable and the good.

Finally, perhaps the deepest of Herder's criticisms of Kant is his
attack upon the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment, his
insistence that there is a continuum rather than discontinuity between
our responses to the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good. But on
the matter of disinterestedness, too, Kant begins with a simple
statement of a position that then turned out to be more complicated
than it initially appeared. There can be no question that Kant wants
to distinguish genuinely aesthetic experience from merely
physiological gratification of the senses, from the approval of
utility, or from moral approval, and that he does this by saying that
aesthetic judgment neither presupposes nor gives rise to any interest
in the existence of its object. But numerous factors complicate this
picture.

First, Kant always defines pleasure as a state of mind connected with
a disposition toward its own continuation, and in the first draft of
the Introduction to the third Critique he adds that pleasure
is a ground “for producing its object” (First Introduction
to CPJ, section VIII, 20:230–1). There are technical
reasons why Kant does not want to speak here of an interest
in the continuation of pleasure and/or the production of its object,
but it is certainly reasonable to say that on Kant's own account any
pleasure, including even the purest pleasure in beauty, is accompanied
with some form of attachment to the possibility of its own
continued and future experience, and therefore ordinarily to the
availability of the objects that trigger that pleasure.

Further, Kant explicitly argues that the properly aesthetic pleasure
in beautiful objects enters into combination with interests, also
properly so called, in the existence of those objects. Under the
rubric of the “empirical interest” in the beautiful, he
argued that there are societal reasons for taking interest in the
availability and possession of beautiful objects. Although he denies
that there is any a priori relation of these reasons to the
experience of beauty (CPJ, §41, 5:297), this is not to
deny the existence of such attachments. Under the rubric of the
“intellectual interest in the beautiful,” Kant then
describes a reason for attachment to the beautiful that is apparently
supposed to be a priori, namely, that the existence of beauty
is a “trace” or “sign” that nature is amenable
to the satisfaction of our moral interests (CPJ,
§42, 5:300).

Kant's conception of an intellectual interest in the beautiful does
not seem entirely remote from Herder's view that our sense of
well-being in an object is accompanied with a corresponding sense of
our own well-being, although there are two key differences. For one,
Herder insists upon a recognition of an objective well-being
to which our subjective feeling of well-being is a response, while for
Kant well-being is always subjective, that is, our own, and
the satisfaction of our aesthetic aims and of our moral aims may be
parallel, but are both subjective. Our aesthetic pleasure in natural
beauty is a sign of the possibility of our moral well-being in nature,
not a response to a harmony in nature that has nothing to do with
us. Second, Kant clearly wants to keep the connection between the
satisfaction of our aesthetic aims and the satisfaction of our moral
interests separate although connected, thus not collapsing aesthetic
pleasure into moral satisfaction. Further, Kant seems to suggest that
a sound moral interest in nature's amenability to our objectives is
a condition of the intellectual but aesthetic interest in the
existence of (natural) beauty. From Herder's point of view, that might
seem to be an excessive moralization of an interest in the beautiful
that should be entirely natural, although from Kant's point of view
Herder's insistence on the continuity of the beautiful and the good
might actually run the risk of an excessive moralization of aesthetic
experience. So no doubt there are differences between them, but it is
misleading of Herder to suggest that Kant simply fails to recognize
that we have a real attachment to the interest in the beautiful. Kant
did recognize that, but wanted to keep that attachment somewhat
complicated and indirect in order to avoid the risk of an excessive
moralization of the aesthetic but at the same time, I might suggest,
also avoid the risk of an excessive aestheticization of the moral.

In conclusion, Kant must be regarded as occupying a central place in
eighteenth-century German aesthetics, although he is hardly the only
important figure in the period. Rather, he synthesized the aesthetics
of truth, especially moral truth, represented by the Wolffians with
the aesthetics of play represented in Germany by Mendelssohn and
Sulzer, but did so in a subtle and complicated way that resisted the
simplifications that Schiller and Herder, for all their other
insights, attempted to press upon him. At the same time, Kant did
refuse to allow the importance of the arousal of emotions for its own
sake in tasteful aesthetic experience, and thus rejected the this
aspect of aesthetic experience that had been recognized by Baumgarten
and Meier and analyzed in considerable detail by Mendelssohn. So
Kant's synthesis of approaches to aesthetic experience was by no means
complete. It might then be expected that the history of aesthetics in
the period immediately following Kant would have turned to the task of
integrating emotional impact into a complex theory of aesthetic
experience. That is not what happened, however, as both Hegel and
Schopenhauer developed different versions of purely cognitivist
aesthetics, rejecting Kant's theory of play, and downplayed the
emotional impact of aesthetic experience even more than Kant had done.
It would take the rest of the nineteenth century to integrate the
three approaches to aesthetics that had been developed in the
eighteenth century. But that is a story for another place.

–––, Metaphysik, in Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgartens Metaphysik, translated by Georg Friedrich
Meier, with notes by Johann August Eberhard, second edition (1783),
edited by Dagmar Mirbach (Jena: Dietrich Scheglmann Reprints,
2005). (The paragraph numbers of the German translation do not
correspond to those of the original Latin, since Meier sometimes
combined several of the original paragraphs into one; Mirbach's
edition includes a table showing the correlation between the two
versions.)

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited
by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000). Page references are to Kant's
gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian Academy of
Sciences, volume V, edited by Wilhelm Windelband (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1913).

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, Essays on the Philosophy and
History of Art, with an introduction by Curtis Bowman, three
volumes (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001).

–––, History of the Art of Antiquity,
translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave, introduction by Alex Potts (Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006).

Wolff, Christian, Metafisica Tedesca, con le Annotazione alla
Metafisica Tedesca, edited by Raffaele Ciafardone (Milan:
Bompiani, 2003). (This edition presents Wolff's German and an Italian
translation on facing pages; the Italian translation may not help many
readers of the present article, but this is the only edition of
Wolff's original text that is newly set in modern type rather than
photographically reproducing the eighteenth-century Fraktur
in which his German works were set. Since I will only refer to the
German text, however, I will cite this edition as German
Metaphysics.)

Baeumler, Alfred, 1923, Das Irrationalitästsproblem in der
Ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts, Halle: Martin Niemeyer.
(This author later became a leading instrument in the Nazification of
the German universities.)

–––, 1951, The Philosophy of the
Enlightenment, translated by Fritz C.A. Koelln and James
P. Pettegrove. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chapter
VII.

Costelloe, Timothy M. (ed.), 2013, The Sublime: From Antiquity
to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Croce, Benedetto, 1922, Æsthetic: As Science of Expression and
General Linguistic, Translated by Douglas Ainslie. Revised
edition. London: Macmillan & Co. (Part I, on the history of
aesthetics, is not included in the 1992 translation by Colin
Lyas.)

Dupré, Louis, 2004, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual
Foundations of Modern Culture, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press. Chapter 4.

McCarthy, John A., 2002, “Criticism and Experience:
Philosophy and Literature in the German Enlightenment.” In
Nicholas Saul (ed.) Philosophy and German Literature
1700–1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp.
13–56.

Acknowledgments

Work on this entry was facilitated by a Laurance S. Rockefeller
Visiting Fellowship at the Princeton University Center for Human
Values. Section 7 draws on Guyer 2005b and Guyer 2006a. Section 8
draws on Guyer 2006b.